Skip Navigation

This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow Search for citing articles in:
ISI Web of Science (21)
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Disclaimer
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by JUDD, T.
Right arrow Articles by GESCHWIND, N.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by JUDD, T.
Right arrow Articles by GESCHWIND, N.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

Brain, Vol. 106, No. 2, 435-457, 1983
© 1983 Oxford University Press

research-article

ALEXIA WITHOUT AGRAPHIA IN A COMPOSER

TEDD JUDD, HOWARD GARDNER and NORMAN GESCHWIND

From the The Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine, Seattle Public Health Hospital 1131 Fourteenth Avenue South, Seattle, WA 98114, the Aphasia Research Center, Boston University School of Medicine Boston, MA 02130 and the Department of Neurology, Harvard Medical School Boston, MA 02215, USA

A 77-year-old composer had a left occipital lobe haemorrhagic infarct giving him a severe reading disturbance with well-preserved writing and without appreciable aphasia. He continued to read music and to compose. His text- and music-reading performance under different conditions suggests that this unusual dissociation was primarily due to four factors. (1) He was unusually talented musically and inferred a great deal about the music he was reading. (2) The symbols of staff music notation are more visually distinctive than the symbols of phonetic language writing systems. (3) In staff music notation, pitch is represented ordinally, and other symbols are also distinguishable by their relative positions and sizes. (4) Music notation can be usefully read by interpreting it acoustically, kinaesthetically or in terms of formal musical concepts; in contrast to written language, it need not be interpreted referentially or in terms of auditory-verbal images. His disorder fits the classic visual-verbal disconnection account of alexia without agraphia and the contemporary view that music involves a family of related but distinct skills probably involving many brain areas in both hemispheres, although different cortical areas make characteristic contributions to different musical behaviours.

Received February 10, 1982. Revised September 2, 1982.
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 BrainHome page
I. McDonald
Musical alexia with recovery: a personal account
Brain, October 1, 2006; 129(10): 2554 - 2561.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Home page
 ScienceHome page
J Sergent, E Zuck, S Terriah, and B MacDonald
Distributed neural network underlying musical sight-reading and keyboard performance
Science, July 3, 1992; 257(5066): 106 - 109.
[Abstract] [PDF]


Disclaimer:
Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.