Volume 1

Aphasia and kindred disorders of speech / by Henry Head.

  • Head, Henry, 1861-1940.
Date:
1926
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Aphasia and kindred disorders of speech / by Henry Head. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    11. All use of language is essentially a development of simple acts of speaking and comprehension of spoken words; it is here that we discover that diversity of manifestations which enables us to divide aphasia into different classes. On the other hand, less primitive and more highly abstract modes of symbolic formulation and expression tend to be disturbed in a more massive and less distinctive manner. 12. Although the defects produced by an organic lesion of the brain fall naturally into disorders of verbal formulation and defective recogni¬ tion of meaning, we cannot divide the manifestations of aphasia according to these categories into two mutually exclusive groups. For the use of language as a whole is more or less affected; defects of verbalisation, if sufficiently severe, disturb the full appreciation of meaning, and want of recognition of meaning prevents the normal formation of words and phrases. 13. Unimpeded symbolic formulation and expression cannot be analysed into a sequence of semantic, nominal, syntactical and verbal procedures following one another in time. The disorders of speech to which these names have been applied do not reveal the normal order of psychical events, but disturb the progressive development of language processes as a whole. 14. The form of behaviour we call the use of language has a history, and many of the phenomena of disordered speech resemble steps by which the complete act was acquired in each individual. The patient may revert to a more primitive mode of response. Apart, however, from the tendency to adopt such methods of executing some particular task, the abnormal manifestations do not strictly correspond to any stages in the historical evolution of speech. 15. Every disorder of speech is manifested in psychical terms, but in no instance can the nature of the morbid phenomena be deduced from a priori consideration of the normal use of language. Each par¬ ticular variety of aphasia represents the response of the organism to a new situation produced by physiological defects, and we cannot discover the form it assumes from any logical conceptions concerning the processes of the mind. 16. The two aspects of language, the formulation of thought and its skilful and exact expression, are not dissociated as the result of dis¬ turbances produced by an organic lesion of the brain. 17. Two groups of linguistic processes tend to become increasingly automatic and can be initiated with comparatively little conscious effort.