Agrammatic but numerate
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A central question in cognitive neuroscience concerns the extent to which language enables other higher cognitive functions. In the case of mathematics, the resources of the language faculty, both lexical and syntactic, have been claimed to be important for exact calculation, and some functional brain imaging studies have shown that calculation is associated with activation of a network of left-hemisphere language regions, such as the angular gyrus and the banks of the intraparietal sulcus. We investigate the integrity of mathematical calculations in three men with large left-hemisphere perisylvian lesions. Despite severe grammatical impairment and some difficulty in processing phonological and orthographic number words, all basic computational procedures were intact across patients. All three patients solved mathematical problems involving recursiveness and structure-dependent operations (for example, in generating solutions to bracket equations). To our knowledge, these results demonstrate for the first time the remarkable independence of mathematical calculations from language grammar in the mature cognitive system.
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The neuropsychological literature features striking dissociations between deficits in linguistic and nonlinguistic abilities.
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- Authors
- Varley, R. A., Klessinger, N. J. C., Romanowski, C. A. J., & Siegal, M.
- Affiliations
- Royal Hallamshire Hospital (GB)
- ORCID
- Varley, Rosemary A.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2005-02-15
- Volume
- 102
- Issue
- 9
- Pages
- 3519-3524
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC552916
- OpenAlex
- W2167569384
- Cited by
- 280
- References
- 41
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 15 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 21 · 2021: 31 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 23 · 2018: 12 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 7 · 2015: 10 · 2014: 12 · 2013: 10 · 2012: 13
- FWCI
- 19.03
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- europepmc.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- White Rose Research Online (University of Leeds, The University of Sheffield, University of York) (acceptedVersion)
- UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Statistics and Probability › Cognitive and developmental aspects of mathematical skills
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Reading and Literacy Development
- Keywords
- numerical cognition, mathematical calculation, language and mathematics, agrammatism, left hemisphere language, angular gyrus, intraparietal sulcus, structural recursion
- MeSH terms
- Aphasia, Humans, Language, Task Performance and Analysis
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