Motor and Language Disorders

Flashcards covering key terminology and definitions related to motor and language disorders.

Huntington's Disease

A motor disorder caused by damage to the striatum and the indirect pathway of the basal ganglia, leading to involuntary movements.

Chorea

Involuntary jerky movements associated with Huntington's Disease.

Akinesia

Inability to initiate spontaneous movements, commonly seen in Parkinson's Disease.

Bradykinesia

Slowness of movements, a symptom of Parkinson's Disease.

L-Dopa

A precursor to dopamine used in therapy for Parkinson's Disease that crosses the blood-brain barrier.

Apraxia

A disorder of motor planning or linking actions to meaning, causing difficulty in performing learned tasks.

Ataxia

Uncoordinated muscle movements caused by damage to the cerebellum.

Dysarthria

Speech output issue related to motor control of speech muscles, often seen in cerebellar damage.

Prosopagnosia

Inability to recognize faces due to damage, often in the right hemisphere.

Aphasia

A language disorder resulting from damage to language processing areas, typically in the left hemisphere. (broca, Wernicke,Conduction)

Broca's Aphasia

A type of nonfluent aphasia where individuals have difficulty with language production and often have agrammatism.

Conduction Aphasia

A type of aphasia caused by damage to the arcuate fasciculus, characterized by the inability to repeat words despite intact comprehension.

Wernicke's Aphasia

A fluent aphasia where individuals produce nonsensical speech and have poor comprehension of spoken and written language.

Pure Word Deafness (Verbal Auditory Agnosia)

A condition resulting from damage to Wernicke's area, where patients can read and write but cannot understand spoken language. deficit in mapping sounds to language meaning

Dyslexia

A learning disorder characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. It often results from a deficit in the phonological component of language.

agnosia

inability to process sensory information, resulting in difficulties recognizing objects or sounds despite having intact sensory functions.

Visual Agnosia

A condition where the eyes work, but the brain cannot recognize what is seen. It demonstrates the dissociation between vision for perception and vision for action.

Apperceptive Visual Agnosia

A type of visual agnosia where the individual cannot form a coherent perception, resulting in an inability to see meaningful wholes due to damage to occipital lobe regions. They can only see smaller parts.

Associative Visual Agnosia

A type of visual agnosia where the individual can perceive objects but cannot assign meaning to them. This condition is associated with bilateral occipitotemporal lesions affecting the ventral stream, or "what?" pathway.

Auditory Agnosia

A condition where individuals can process sounds but cannot link them to meanings.

Nonverbal Auditory Agnosia

A type of auditory agnosia where individuals can understand non-verbal sounds but cannot map them to their meanings, for example, recognizing that a bark corresponds to a dog.

Pure Alexia

Agnosia for written words, where individuals can see and write but cannot read. This condition is caused by damage to the posterior part of the corpus callosum and left occipital temporal regions, leading to an inability to understand written words. Complete loss of reading ability occurs when both left and right areas are cut off.

Surface Dyslexia

A reading disorder where individuals can read nonwords but are unable to go from word to meaning due to damage to the lexical semantic route, leading them to rely on grapheme-phoneme conversion. Regularization errors may occur, where reading phonemes can lead to inaccurate readings.

Phonological Dyslexia

A type of dyslexia where individuals can read familiar words but cannot read nonwords due to damage to the grapheme-phoneme conversion process. They rely on meaning related to known words.

Acquired Deep Dyslexia

A severe form of dyslexia resulting from damage to both lexical routes, where individuals can read real words better but make semantic errors, such as reading 'CAT' as 'dog.'