Neurolinguistic status and localization of lesion in aphasic patients with exclusively consonant-vowel recurring utterances.

Eight patients are presented whose speech production consisted exclusively of one and the same recurring consonant-vowel (CV) syllable, similar to Broca's first patient Leborgne ('Tan-tan'). Their neurolinguistic, aphasiological and localizational status was examined and compared with 32 patients with standard global aphasia and 15 with Broca's aphasia. Patients with exclusively CV speech production represent a variety of global aphasia, characterized by fluency of output and the preservation of some prosody. Localization of the CT lesion did not distinguish between the nonstandard fluent global aphasics described here and the well-known standard nonfluent global aphasics. The individual lesions in both subgroups show great variability in size and localization, which is not recognized in the usual cumulative representations of CT lesions.