Pure+Word+Deafness

Causes
-Destructive lesion involving the left auditory receiving area - Wernicke's area becomes disconnected from almost all sources of acoustic input

Symptoms
When due to a unilateral lesion of the left temporal lobe, is partly a consequence of an inability to extract temporal-sequential features from incoming sounds making linguistic messages unrecognizable

-Unable to recognize or perceive the sounds of language, sentences, single words, or even single letters. -All other aspects of comprehension are preserved, including reading, writing, and expressive speech. -If right temporal region is spared, ability to recognize musical and environmental sounds is preserved but ability to name/describe them is impaired

Treatment
Pure word deafness can sometimes be partly overcome if the patient is spoken to in an extremely slowed manner.

Pure word deafness is most common with bilateral lesions in which case environmental sound recognition is also effected and is considered cortical deafness. Pure word deafness is more common with bilateral lesions simply because this prevents the any remaining intact auditory areas in the left hemisphere from receiving auditory input from the right temporal lobe via the corpus callosum.
 * Bilateral Lesions **