A 57-year-old woman in Japan noticed something odd after a stroke: she could no longer text properly. Standard testing found no aphasia, the language disorder that often follows strokes on the left side of the brain, and no agraphia, a loss of the ability to write. Yet on her smartphone, she struggled to find the keys for consonants and to swipe in the right direction to choose vowels.
Neurologists at Niigata University's Brain Research Institute describe the case in a report published in the journal Cortex, which appeared online in September. They call the problem dystextia, a disability in composing text messages, and note that dystextia "without aphasia or other cognitive impairment remains rare."
