Dynamic aphasia and the generation of language

Severely reduced propositional speech in the context of intact nominal language skills (i.e., repetition, naming, comprehension, and reading) is the hallmark of dynamic aphasia (Luria, 1970). Recent evidence suggests there may be different types of dynamic aphasia as some patients do not produce any response on verbal generation tasks, whilst others are able to perform normally on verbal genera- tion tasks. For example, Robinson and colleagues (Robinson, Blair, & Cipolotti, 1998; Robinson, Shallice, & Cipolotti, 2004) reported two dynamic aphasics who failed to produce a verbal response when many verbal response options were activated by a stimulus, but not when a dominant response was available. By contrast, a dynamic aphasic patient reported by Snowden, Griffiths, and Neary (1996) was able to produce sentences and words on specific verbal gener- ation tasks. We report a dynamic aphasic patient (KAS) who, sim- ilarly to the patient reported by Snowden et al. performed flawlessly on all verbal generation tasks, despite almost abolished propositional speech.