Abstract

from typical Wernicke's aphasia to the later picture of disproportionate but not "pure " alexia and agraphia. The persistent aphasic deficits of paraphasic speech and mildly impaired auditory comprehension still showed the residual fluent aphasia. As stated in our paper, we sought to stress not the issue of nomenclature of aphasia classification, but rather the point that reading and auditory comprehension deficits do not always go hand in hand in fluent aphasia. Our earlier, companion paper,4 which described cases of Wer-nicke's aphasia with poor auditory com-prehension but intact reading, also exem-plifies the dissociation of modalities in some cases of fluent aphasia. The numer-ous other studies cited in that paper pro-vide additional evidence for this dissocia-tion. We believe that the exploration of modality differences in aphasic syndromes is not only of theoretical interest but also of importance in guiding strategies of speech and language rehabilitation, through the use of spared modalities.