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Abstract

Prior to a neurosurgical resection, most patients with tumors in the left hemisphere of the brainshow normal or close to normal language abilities. After the surgery, however, many patientspresent with significant language decline, which often resolves over several months (Duffau etal. 2003). Previous studies reported different rates of aphasia in the acute post-operative phase,ranging from 17% to 100% (Papagno et al. 2012). Critically, the mechanisms of postsurgicallanguage deficits are not understood, the main question being if they follow a traditional syn-dromatic pattern of a common post-stroke aphasia. Most studies that attempted to analyzepostsurgical language outcomes used incomprehensive language testing (Davies et al. 2005); inothers, subjective scoring of tests was used (Wilson et al. 2015). We used the comprehensiveand objectively rated Russian Aphasia Test (Ivanova et al. 2016) to examine the pattern oflanguage deficits in the acute phase in patients who underwent a tumor resection in the lefthemisphere and compared it to performance of individuals with post-stroke aphasia on thesame test.