memory of words, the acoustic impressions only serving to awaken that memory from its torpor.[1] We may have to allow for this hypothesis, but it does not appear to us to account for the curious phenomena of echolalia, long since pointed out by Romberg,[2] Voisin[3] and Forbes Winslow,[4] which are termed by Kussmaul[5] (probably with some exaggeration) acoustic reflexes. Here the subject repeats mechanically, and perhaps unconsciously, the words he hears, as though the auditory sensations converted themselves automatically into movements of articulation. From these facts some have inferred that there is a special mechanism which unites a so-called acoustic centre of words with an articulatory centre of speech.[6] The truth appears to lie between these two hypotheses. There is more in these various phenomena than absolutely mechanical actions, but less than an appeal to voluntary memory. They testify to a tendency of verbal auditory impressions to
- ↑ Bastian, On Different Kinds of Aphasia (British Medical Journal, Oct. and Nov. 1887, p. 935).
- ↑ Romberg, Lehrbuch der Nervenkrankheiten, 1853, vol. ii.
- ↑ Quoted by Bateman, On Aphasia. London, 1890, p. 79.—Cf. Marcé, Mémoire sur quelques observations de physiologie pathologique (Mém. de la Soc. de Biologie, 2nd series, vol. ii, p. 102).
- ↑ Forbes Winslow, On Obscure Diseases of the Brain. London, 1861, p. 505.
- ↑ Kussmaul, Die Störungen der Sprache, Leipzig. 1877, pp. 55 et seq.
- ↑ Arnaud, Contribution à l'étude clinique de la surdité verbale (Arch. de neurologie, 1886, p. 192).—Spamer, Ueber Asymbolie (Arch. f. Psychiatrie, vol. vi, pp. 507 and 524).
