Context |
The 1770 monograph of Johann Gesner entitled “Speech Amnesia” was the first major study of the disorder (see Benton, 1965). It was a landmark contribution on a number of counts. From a clinical standpoint, the six case reports in it provided a wealth of information about such diverse features of aphasia as jargonaphasia and jargonagraphia, inability to read aloud with preserved ability to read silently for understanding, greater impairment in reading one language than another, and preservation of the ability to recite familiar prayers within the setting of defective conversational speech. Moreover, in contrast to earlier authors, Gesner emphasized that word-finding difficulties and paraphasic speech reflect not a loss of memory in general but a specific type of memory loss, namely, speech amnesia.
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