Language alterations in temporal lobe epilepsies
Keywords:
epilepsy, language alterations, lexical access, aphasia, neurolinguistics.Abstract
Recent researches have shown that language alterations in epilepsies can take place not only during the seizures, so-called transient aphasia, but also along the progression of the disease
and intensification of the symptoms. Among the major language alterations described, we highlight the difficulty of lexical access. We aim to present the main issues related to phenomena associated with epilepsy, especially in TLE, and to explicit how the language alterations are presented in the literature. In addition, we aim to indicate the contributions made by neuropsychological and neurolinguistic studies, based on linguistic analyses that consider not only the subjects’ difficulties with the language resources, but also alternative strategies of signification. Our discussion is supported by Discursive Neurolinguistics, developed at IEL / UNICAMP.