Luria’s classification of aphasias and its theoretical basis

Abstract

Background: Every qualified neuropsychologist knows about Luria's contribution to neuropsychology and aphasiology in general, but many of them believe his ideas to be out of date. Aims: The purpose of this article is to investigate Alexander Luria's methodology of classification of aphasias and to describe the forms of aphasias that he distinguished.Main contribution: The article shows that the classification of aphasias was based on a profound theoretical research performed by Luria together with the founder of cultural-historical psychology, Lev Vygotsky. Their theoretical views including systemic, dynamic, evolutionary, and socio-cultural approaches to the analysis of functioning and disintegration of higher mental functions are congenial to the contemporary cognitive neuroscience. The descriptions of Luria's classic forms of aphasia are updated using more recent data from Russian aphasiologists. The article provides the comparison of Russian and Western classifications of aphasias. Conclusions: Understanding the main ideas of the Vygotskian-Lurian neuropsychology, and particularly of Luria's classification of aphasias, may be useful for the contemporary cognitive neuroscience and for the rehabilitation of patients with aphasia.

History of Studying Semantic Aphasia Mechanisms (Based on Materials from Lurian Archive)

“…However, in the study by Tsvetkova, patients with acoustic-amnestic and semantic types of aphasia (predominantly of vascular etiology) were not divided. The later studies of semantic deficits, which distinguished both of these aphasic forms and slight visual agnosia [19][20][21], confirmed Luria's earlier viewpoint [1,2]. Special experiments showed that patients with semantic aphasia, along with poor understanding of reversible grammatical constructions, experienced nominative problems because of the poor operating with a word's categorical meaning.…”

Effects of regiolects on the perception of developmental foreign accent syndrome

“…Acoustic-mnestic aphasia is characterized by instability of auditory images of words which can lead to the alienation of word meaning. Sensory aphasia is characterized by impaired comprehension based on the primary impairment of phonemic perception (Akhutina, 2016;Luria, 1970). Both our patients complied with this view, at the same time extending the notion of the syndromes into the domain of verb and sentence processing.…”

“…The types of aphasia of the brain-damaged speakers were established using Luria's classification (Akhutina, 2015;. The four aphasia types present in the corpus include two with non-fluent speech output (efferent motor and dynamic aphasias) and two with fluent speech output (sensory and acoustic-mnestic aphasias).…”

“…Impaired inner speech programming and verbal planning were suggested to be the underlying disorders in this aphasia type; motor and sensory aspects of speech processing, lexical access and grammatical encoding are relatively intact in such patients (Akhutina, 2016). Luria (1970) related dynamic aphasia to damage to the left prefrontal cortex (Brodmann's Areas 9,10,46).…”

Sensitivity to extralinguistic cues to identify generic and non-generic meaning

“…Semantic aphasia -a type of aphasia not included in the Boston classification -results from a lesion in the area of the left temporalparietal-occipital junction (Akhutina 2015;Dragoy et al 2015). Two specific deficits underlying semantic aphasia are difficulties in: (i) finding words and (ii) understanding logical-grammatical constructions such as genitive, passive, double negation or embedded clause.…”