Aphasia
Aphasia is a language disorder that affects a person's ability to communicate. It is typically caused by damage to the brain, often resulting from a stroke or head injury. Individuals with aphasia may have difficulty speaking, understanding language, reading, and writing, but the specific symptoms can vary depending on the type and severity of the condition.
6 Key excerpts on "Aphasia"
eBook - ePubThe Neurolinguistics of Bilingualism
An Introduction
- Franco Fabbro(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...CHAPTER FIVE Aphasia: The undoing of language The most widespread method of assessing the cerebral organization of language is that of observing patients with language disorders caused by localized cerebral lesions. Depending on the site and the extent of the left cortical lesion, different language disorders can arise, which have been defined in many technical ways (parAphasia, anomia, neologism, agrammatism, paragrammatism, etc.). Moreover, some typical language disruption patterns have been detected and defined as aphasic syndromes (Broca’s Aphasia, Wernicke’s Aphasia, conduction Aphasia, motor and sensory transcortical Aphasia, global Aphasia, anomic Aphasia). They are particularly useful in the patient’s clinical assessment. Recent studies have shown that the right hemisphere is also involved in specific aspects of verbal communication. BASIC TERMINOLOGY IN Aphasia The term Aphasia refers to a loss of linguistic faculty as a consequence of a cerebral lesion. There are various types of lesions causing Aphasia (cranial trauma, infection, tumor, cerebral infarction, and hemorrhage). Aphasia is characterized by errors in verbal expression that are known as parAphasias (substitution of one element for another), word-finding difficulties (anomias), and comprehension disorders. The study of language disorders and the patients’ rehabilitation from them is an important branch of medicine and employs many researchers, and the technical terms used need an explanation before we come to a description of the various types of Aphasia (Blanken, Dittmann, Grimm, Marshall, & Wallesch, 1993; Lecours and Lhermitte, 1979; Taylor Sarno, 1981). 1. Phonemic parAphasia may result in the production of a nonword. This type of error in verbal expression consists in the substitution of one or two phonemes within a word that the patient wanted to produce...
- Amy E. Wenzel(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...Other etiologies that may cause Aphasia include brain tumors, infections (e.g., encephalitis, meningitis), hypoxic-ischemic injuries (e.g., near drowning, cardiac arrest), and certain progressive neurological diseases (e.g., frontotemporal lobar degeneration); the prevalence of Aphasia subsequent to the onset of these disorders, however, is yet to be documented. It is roughly estimated that each year approximately 100,000 individuals in the United States develop Aphasia, although this is likely an underestimation given this estimate is based primarily on stroke data. Common Language Symptoms Although Aphasia characteristics and severity may vary substantially from individual to individual, there are some common language symptoms observed among those with Aphasia. Language comprehension difficulties, both in spoken and written modalities, are frequent and make assigning meaning to linguistic messages challenging. Such comprehension difficulties may arise from problems in decoding individual sounds or letters, words or word affixes, grammar, or a combination of these levels of language processing. Within an individual, the severity of the comprehension problem may be influenced by characteristics of the to-be-understood material (e.g., word familiarity, grammar complexity, utterance length) as well as the communicative context (e.g., noisy environment, unfamiliar speaker accent). Language production difficulties are ubiquitous among individuals with Aphasia. In particular, word retrieval impairments, also known as anomia, are commonplace, in which the individual may be inaccurate or slow at coming up with the names of people, objects, locations, and actions...
eBook - ePub- Richard Wilson, Preeti Raghavan(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Elsevier(Publisher)
...Oral language impairment can include oral expressive and/or auditory comprehension deficits. Both oral expressive and oral receptive language impairment may be evidenced in any of the linguistic domains of phonology, semantics, morphology, or syntax (although pragmatic skills are often preserved). In addition, language impairment in the visual language domain may be evidenced in reading (alexia) and/or writing (agraphia); manual language (sign language) and gesture can also be affected. In essence, all modalities of language: oral expressive, oral receptive, reading, writing, and manual/gesture can be impaired after stroke, resulting in Aphasia, alexia, and agraphia. Classification and Types of Aphasia There have been numerous classification systems proposed for describing Aphasia (as many as 30, see Ref. 2). A current widely used Aphasia classification system among aphasiologists is the Boston classification system 3 that reflects the classical associative connectionist model based on the Wernicke/Lichtheim model with some modifications by Geschwind. 4, 5 The commonly used Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE) originally published by Goodglass and Kaplan, 6 with its most recent publication in 2001 (Goodglass, Kaplan, and Barresi) classifies Aphasia based on a neurolinguistic system. Depending upon the location of the brain damage, and the relative degree of impairment and sparing of language skills, classic subtypes of Aphasia have been defined. 3 While individuals with Broca and transcortical motor Aphasia are associated with anterior brain damage, those with posterior brain damage present with Wernicke, transcortical sensory, conduction, or anomic Aphasia. Individuals with global Aphasia have both anterior and posterior brain damage. Aphasia is referred to as nonfluent or fluent, based on the degree of fluency in oral expressive language...
eBook - ePubAn Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
Processes and Disorders
- David Groome(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...chapter 11 Disorders of language Sophie Scott DOI: 10.4324/9781351020862-11 Contents 11.1 Introduction 11.2 Models of Aphasia 11.3 Detailed symptoms of aphasic profiles 11.4 Psychological and psycholinguistic aspects of Aphasia 11.5 Functional imaging of human language processing 11.6 Reading 11.7 Developmental disorders of language Summary Further reading 11.1 Introduction How is language represented in the human brain, and how can this go wrong? This chapter will outline the historical background of studies of language and the human brain, studies which for many years were primarily focused on case studies of people who had acquired brain damage which affected their use of language. The chapter will also address more recent developments in the ways that these linguistic processes can be investigated in healthy human brains. Finally, when thinking of disorders of language, in addition to language problems which arise due to brain damage, there are developmental language disorders. In acquired damage, a healthy brain is lesioned, for example via a stroke (where the blood supply to the brain is disrupted), disease (e.g. encephalitis), a tumour, trauma (e.g. a penetrating object), or a progressive disease such as Pick’s disease. These causes of brain damage are all different in terms of what leads to them, what kinds of damage they cause and what kinds of recovery are possible, but all lead to a non-transient disruption in brain damage. The second kind of language disorder is one related to developmental issues, such as autism, or specific language impairment, where the brain is affected either during its development in utero (e.g. due to genetic factors), or in infancy and childhood. The emphasis here is less on how the brain is damaged, and more on how a child’s behaviour and brain function is affected over the course of development...
eBook - ePubIntroduction to Psycholinguistics
Understanding Language Science
- Matthew J. Traxler(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...In comprehension, the inability to use speech to access the conceptual store interferes with semantic interpretation. In production, the inability of the speech planning centers to access the appropriate phonological codes leads to speech that is essentially meaningless. Damage to Broca’s area should interfere with the processes necessary for the construction of syntactically well-formed utterances and with planning and executing the motor movements necessary for speech, leading to apraxia of speech (labored, halting, “telegraphic” output). Damage to the arcuate fasciculus should sever communication between the posterior language-processing areas and Broca’s area, leading to problems repeating the verbatim input, but sparing the ability to understand language and the ability to produce meaningful speech. These three kinds of language disorders are referred to as Wernicke’s, Broca’s, and conduction Aphasia, respectively. In the next section, we will explore each of these disorders in more detail. SAMPLE OF SPEECH FROM A FLUENT APHASIC PATIENT (FROM DICK ET AL., 2001). (In response to a question about the episode in which he suffered his stroke): It just suddenly had a feffort and all the feffort had gone with it. It even stepped my horn. They took them from earth you know. They make my favorite nine to severed and now I’m a been habed by the uh stam of fortment of my annulment which is now forever. WERNICKE’S Aphasia Wernicke’s Aphasia (also known as fluent Aphasia) is characterized by fluent but largely meaningless speech and difficulty comprehending spoken and written input. The box on p. 483 provides a sample of the kind of speech produced by a patient with Wernicke’s Aphasia. You can see video of a patient with Wernicke’s Aphasia here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVhYN7NTIKU...
eBook - ePubTalking Heads
The Neuroscience of Language
- Gianfranco Denes(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...4 Acquired language disorders: The Aphasias In the years following the observations of Broca and Wernicke, neurologists interested in language noticed the frequent association, in most aphasic patients, between different types of language impairment. It was observed, for example, that a lesion of Broca’s area not only affected single word production but was often linked to a syntactic deficit, present in both sentence production and comprehension (agrammatism, Pick, 1913). Similarly, the comprehension deficit following a lesion of Wernicke’s area was often associated with a lexical deficit affecting the production of single words and a specific impairment in sentence construction (paragrammatism). The study of the association of aphasic symptoms had a main role in the building up of the taxonomy of the aphasic syndromes, denotating a cluster of symptoms that tend to co-occur and are related by some anatomical or functional peculiarity. The concept of an aphasic syndrome has assumed both anatomical and functional valence. When considering anatomy, it is suggested that the association of symptoms is a consequence of the fact that certain areas are anatomical neighbours and share a blood supply (weak syndrome). To give an example, the association of phonetic and phonological disorders to agrammatism could be because the neural substrates of articulatory programming and syntactic processing, although independent, are supplied by the same cerebral artery which, when occluded, will put both systems out of use. Conversely, according to the functional hypothesis, the aphasic syndrome reflects the effects of a lesion to a single anatomo-functional mechanism that serves different tasks (strong syndrome)...
