Practical Applications of Neuro-Linguistic Research in Writing and Speech

Problems and Objectives of Neuro-Linguistic Research in Writing and Speech

This book by one of the leading psychologists of the 20th century presents two of his monographs: “Essays on the Psychophysiology of Writing” (1950) and “Fundamental Problems of Neurolinguistics” (1975). Both works analyze the psychological structure of writing and speech using neuropsychological methods. Although written 25 years apart, they share a common goal: to describe the structure of complex functional systems of speech and writing in normal conditions, using neuropsychological methodology.

The issues of the structure of speech and writing functions, as explored by A. R. Luria, are now more relevant than ever in practice. Neuro-linguistic analysis of speech structure has become the theoretical foundation for speech therapy and psychological work aimed at overcoming difficulties in speech development or its disorders due to brain injuries. Neuropsychological and neuro-linguistic analysis of writing forms the theoretical basis for studying dysgraphia and developing methods to correct writing development deviations.

The author compares writing disorders caused by localized brain lesions with the results of analyzing the development of this function in children, both in normal and atypical development. This book serves as an excellent introduction to cognitive neuropsychology and the neuropsychology of cognitive processes. It demonstrates how neuropsychological methods can be used to solve general psychological problems, develop health-preserving educational technologies, and assist children with learning difficulties.

In the preface, A. R. Luria writes that “neurolinguistics is a new branch of science at the intersection of psychology, neurology, and linguistics. It studies the brain mechanisms of speech activity and the changes in speech processes that occur with localized brain lesions.” The foundation of this field is the neuropsychological method of analysis, which involves identifying the primary defect from the complex picture of speech disorders.

What is the main research problem in this field? The psychological content of the writing process, which is crucial for organizing initial literacy instruction, remains insufficiently known to teachers and educators. Luria notes that mastering writing involves many psychological operations and that educators must consider the roles of auditory analysis and articulation, which ensure correct pronunciation.

This work aims to help clarify these issues, study the psychophysiological content of initial writing skills in depth, and answer which psychophysiological processes are involved in writing and what difficulties students may encounter when first learning to write.

To investigate these questions, the author describes the psychophysiological mechanisms of writing, tracing which brain cortex systems are involved and how disruptions in specific cortical areas, responsible for different psychophysiological aspects of writing, can impair this skill.

Functions of Different Brain Cortex Areas

The author explains that the development of writing and written speech follows a completely different path from spoken language. While spoken language is acquired practically through “live adaptation” to adult speech and its articulation remains unconscious for a long time, writing is a conscious act from the start, constructed deliberately through special instruction.

In the early stages of learning to write, each operation—analyzing the sound to be written, finding each letter, writing the letter—is a separate, consciously performed action. However, because writing is a complex mental activity with many components that are not always clearly recognized, analyzing its psychological structure is very challenging.

Psychological Content of the Writing Process

Writing always begins with a specific task or intention, which either arises in the writer or is given to them. This intention, which must be turned into a full sentence, needs to be maintained and, through inner speech, developed into a structured phrase whose parts must remain in order.

Tracking the results obtained by different methods and the difficulties children face when taught in various ways can provide valuable material for analyzing the mental processes involved in developing writing skills. There is a need to find methods that allow the isolation and study of individual components of the writing process. One such method is analyzing writing in patients with localized brain cortex lesions—a path made possible by advances in neurology and neurosurgery.

Modern Science on Brain Function

• Occipital area: Central apparatus of vision; processes visual stimuli and forms visual analysis and synthesis.
• Temporal area (left hemisphere): Central apparatus for auditory sensations and analysis.
• Parietal area: Analyzes sensations from the skin and muscles, crucial for fine and precise movements, as these require constant feedback about body position.
• Frontal cortex: Organizes the timing of movements, develops and maintains motor skills, and coordinates complex, goal-directed actions.

The coordinated work of all these brain cortex areas is necessary for normal execution of complex psychological processes, including speech, writing, and reading. If any part of this system is underdeveloped, damaged, or otherwise impaired, the corresponding psychophysiological process is also disrupted. The greater the role of a particular area, the more significant the resulting impairment.

Thus, the author’s research is based on studying brain lesions, which serves as a method for analyzing the psychological structure of writing and its prerequisites.

Types of Writing Process Organization

Brain Organization of Writing

Damage to almost any area of the left hemisphere’s cortex—including the temporal, occipital, inferior parietal, and inferior frontal regions—can cause writing disorders. Observations show that damage to the left temporal area in adults leads not only to impaired complex auditory discrimination but also to the breakdown of writing processes.

The author emphasizes that every genuine act of writing involves not only visual components but also auditory analysis, and the less familiar a word is, the more it relies on sound analysis.

The Role of Auditory Analysis in Writing

Each act of writing involves both visual and auditory components, and unfamiliar words require even more auditory analysis.

The Role of Articulation in Writing

What role do overt or covert articulations play in writing? These functions are performed by the parietal (“postcentral”) areas of the brain cortex, which synthesize kinesthetic sensations and create movement schemes. Studies show that damage to these areas not only disrupts complex forms of sensitivity but also causes movements to lose their precision due to lack of necessary feedback. Pronouncing the word being written is not just an accompaniment but an essential part of the process.

Visual Organization of Writing

Luria notes that two types of visual defects can occur during initial writing instruction. The first involves forgetting the shapes of rarely used letters, leading to confusion between similar letters. The second involves mixing up visually similar letter shapes and difficulty distinguishing their spatial arrangement. These issues are linked to the occipital and occipito-parietal areas of the brain, which enable holistic visual perception, transform visual sensations into complex images, and support advanced visual and spatial cognition. Sometimes, spatial writing disorders manifest as mirror writing.

Psychophysiological Conditions for Maintaining Sound Sequence in Writing

Maintaining the correct sequence of sounds when writing a word is one of the main challenges in developing writing skills. Experience with syllable and word writing disorders in Broca’s area lesions and efferent motor aphasia shows that the only way to overcome this defect is to pronounce the words aloud as they are written.

Maintaining Writing Intent and Its Psychophysiological Basis

Sometimes, when attention is distracted or a child is tired, writing errors occur not due to technical issues but because the child repeats previously written words or inserts random elements into a sentence. In these cases, the original intention is unstable and easily lost, causing significant writing difficulties. Such cases are rare in normal conditions but common in pathological cases, especially with frontal lobe lesions.

Neuropsychological Analysis of Speech Communication

The author asserts that the task of studying the real processes of forming and understanding speech messages, as well as their components and conditions, belongs to psychology and psycholinguistics.

Main Stages of Speech Communication

L. S. Vygotsky traced the process of thought formation, viewing it as a condensed (abbreviated) action. Inner speech, from this perspective, is the mechanism that transforms internal subjective meanings into a system of external, expanded speech meanings. This psychological characteristic, formulated by Vygotsky, is a key element in understanding the process.

Psychological Conditions for Forming a Speech Message

Two main factors are involved: the paradigmatic relationship of individual lexical meanings (concept formation through “simultaneous synthesis” of information elements) and the syntagmatic combination of words into statements (“serial organization of speech processes”). Both are essential for turning thought into speech and for developing utterances.

Neuropsychological Analysis of Speech Communication

The human brain, as a complex functional system, operates with at least three main blocks: one ensures cortical arousal and selective activity, another handles information reception, processing, and storage, and the third manages programming, regulation, and control of ongoing activity.

Neuropsychological Analysis of Speech Message Formation

The nature of these processes is especially evident in studies of dialogic speech with patients, where they are asked questions and must provide appropriate answers.

A. Disorders of the Syntagmatic Apparatus in Speech Message Formation

• Deep brain lesions: General inactivity and rapid fatigue affect all types of activity—motor, speech, and intellectual—at all levels of speech communication.
• Frontal lobe lesions: Profound disruption of complex motives, intentions, and behavioral programs. Damage to the frontal lobes (especially the prefrontal areas of the left hemisphere) leads to a unique pattern of speech communication disorder, characterized by impaired motivation, inability to form or maintain an intention, and lack of a stable program to guide speech. Despite preserved operational aspects of speech, patients are practically deprived of extended speech activity.
• Dynamic aphasia: The main symptom is a marked impairment of spontaneous, extended speech, which is clearly dissociated from other preserved aspects of speech. These patients may show a tendency to reduce complex syntactic structures to simpler ones, but without pronounced agrammatism (“telegraphic style”).
• Predicative structure disorders (“telegraphic style”): Another form of speech disorder involves not so much the overall programming of utterances as the grammatical (especially predicative, syntactic) structure. This results in a breakdown of surface-syntactic structures, limiting speech to nominative functions and producing the well-known “telegraphic style.”
• Complex efferent motor aphasia: General inactivity and inertia of nervous processes combine with specific speech coding disorders, leading to a comprehensive breakdown of speech activity. Such cases are valuable as unique methods for neurolinguistic research.

B. Disorders of the Paradigmatic Apparatus in Speech Message Formation

This aspect concerns the organization of language codes (units), their structure, and the disorders that can occur in their use with localized brain lesions. The most complex level is the semantic organization of language codes.

• Afferent motor aphasia: Lesions in the lower postcentral area of the left hemisphere disrupt the ability to acquire and use articulatory language codes.
• Acoustic component disorders (sensory aphasia): Lesions in the upper left temporal area (Wernicke’s area) cause “sensory” or “acoustic-gnostic” aphasia, characterized by impaired mastery of the language’s sound codes.
• Acoustic-mnestic aphasia: Patients retain the phonemic structure of language but cannot maintain auditory-verbal traces, losing them easily due to pauses or interference, which prevents stable auditory-verbal chains.
• Fronto-temporal syndrome: Lexical elements are easily replaced by others, losing selectivity, and structural elements become so inert that patients cannot switch, leading to pathological stereotypes in speech.
• Semantic aphasia: Significant coding disorders manifest as word-finding difficulties (“amnestic aphasia”) and problems understanding or formulating complex logical-grammatical relationships (“semantic aphasia”).

Neuropsychological Analysis of Speech Message Comprehension

The psychological process of understanding a speech message includes:

• The psychology of verbal thinking or cognitive activity in general
• Understanding lexical elements and word meanings
• Understanding syntactic constructions
• Understanding complex messages (texts)

Different patterns are observed in patients with lesions of the inferior parietal and parietal areas, especially when the medial (deep) parts of the left temporal area and occipital regions are affected.

• Temporal lobe lesions and sensory aphasia: These cause phonemic hearing disorders and instability of lexical units.
• Parieto-occipital lesions and semantic aphasia: These lead to different types of decoding disorders, as described in other publications.
• Postcentral and premotor area lesions and motor aphasia: Disorders of speech comprehension and decoding in these cases are still not well understood. This form, known as afferent (kinesthetic) motor aphasia, arises from lesions in the postcentral, kinesthetic speech zones. Decoding complex speech messages involves at least three steps: identifying the exact meaning of individual words, understanding the syntactic relationships between them, and grasping the overall meaning of the message.

The Significance of A. R. Luria’s Research

The author pays great attention to understanding the psychological structure of utterance construction, a topic still actively discussed by psychologists and linguists. A valuable aspect of this work is Luria’s use of clear examples of writing with various brain cortex lesions. Today’s debates will be resolved by the next generation of researchers, and the best introduction to these issues can be found in A. R. Luria’s book, which, due to its wealth of factual material, breadth of comparison, and depth of generalization, deserves a place among the world’s best works on the mechanisms of speech.