Conduction Aphasia

Three patients with conduction aphasia are described; in addition to the distinctive language disorder, two of them had severe ideomotor apraxia while the other was entirely free of apraxia. Postmortem examination revealed that the two patients with apraxia had entirely suprasylvian lesions involving the white matter deep to the parietal operculum, while the nonapraxic subject had suffered total destruction of the Wernicke area. Based on these findings and a review of the literature, we would propose the following: (1) Conduction aphasia is a distinct clinical syndrome, readily separable from other varieties of aphasia. (2) Conduction aphasia can result from a pure suprasylvian or a pure subsylvian lesion as well as from a combination of the two. (3) The presence of ideomotor apraxia in conduction aphasia implicates suprasylvian pathology.