Brain Specialization for Language: Not Dependent on Literacy-Reply

This article is only available in the PDF format. Download the PDF to view the article, as well as its associated figures and tables.

In Reply.—  Drs Currier, Haerer, and Farmer raise the suspicion that illiterate patients may have been preselected for aphasia or left hemisphere lesions by avenue of referral. This may be true, but, if so, literate patients have also been affected by the same factor, and, since we are making between-group comparisons, the argument is not valid.In reply to the question about left vs right hemisphere lesions in literate patients, we have evaluated another group of 225 right-handed focal brain-damaged patients studied in the same facility and selected in the same manner. The results are summarized in the Table. The distribution of left and right hemisphere lesions did not differ for the two groups (ϰ² = 1.403; df = 1; NS). Furthermore, the frequency of aphasia among patients with focal lesions in the left hemisphere did not differ for the literate and illiterate groups (ϰ² = 1.403; df = 1; NS). Similarly, irrespective of