Aphasia Types and Neurogenic Communication Disorders Vocabulary

Vocabulary practice flashcards generated directly from lecture notes detailing connectionist aphasia types and key neurogenic communication disorder definitions.

Broca's Aphasia

A connectionist aphasia type with a predicted lesion site in Broca's area, characterized by nonfluent fluency, mild to moderately impaired comprehension, impaired naming, and repetition similar to spontaneous speech.

Wernicke's Aphasia

A connectionist aphasia type with a predicted lesion site in Wernicke's area, characterized by fluent speech, moderately to severely impaired comprehension, impaired naming, and repetition similar to spontaneous speech.

Global Aphasia

A connectionist aphasia type with predicted lesion sites in the anterior and posterior left hemisphere, characterized by nonfluent speech, moderately to severely impaired comprehension, impaired naming, and repetition similar to spontaneous speech.

Transcortical Motor Aphasia

A connectionist aphasia type with a predicted lesion site anterior or superior to Broca's area, characterized by nonfluent speech, mild to moderately impaired comprehension, impaired naming, and repetition that is less impaired than spontaneous speech.

Transcortical Sensory Aphasia

A connectionist aphasia type with a predicted lesion site in the posterior temporal lobe extending into the occipital lobe, characterized by fluent speech, moderately to severely impaired comprehension, impaired naming, and repetition that is less impaired than spontaneous speech.

Transcortical Mixed Aphasia (Isolation Aphasia)

A connectionist aphasia type with predicted lesion sites in the anterior and posterior association areas in the left hemisphere, characterized by nonfluent speech, moderately to severely impaired comprehension, impaired naming, and repetition that is less impaired than spontaneous speech.

Conduction Aphasia

Aphasia with a predicted lesion site in the left arcuate fasciculus and/or supramarginal gyrus in the inferior parietal lobe. Characterized by disproportionately severe deficits during repetition (more impaired than spontaneous speech), relatively good (mild to moderately impaired) comprehension, fluent spontaneous speech, and mild to moderate naming deficits.

Anomic Aphasia

Aphasia characterized by a relatively isolated impairment of naming with fluent language output, normal to mildly/relatively good comprehension of spoken and written language, and repetition similar to spontaneous speech. Predicted lesion site can be anywhere in the left hemisphere.

Agrammatism

The production of short utterances that consist primarily of content words (nouns/verbs), contain relatively few function words (articles/conjunctions), have either simplified or incomplete grammatical structure, and represent a restricted range of sentence types or forms.

Agraphia

Impaired written expression. Also called acquired dysgraphia.

Alexia

Disruption in written language comprehension. Also known as acquired dyslexia.

Alzheimer's disease (AD)

The most common cause of irreversible dementia and dementia in general. Its etiology remains unknown, although genetic and other physiological causes are still being investigated. Confirmation of an AD diagnosis can only be made upon autopsy.

Anomia

Difficulty recalling the names of people, objects, locations, concepts, and actions.

Anosognosia

An impaired awareness or denial of one's own deficits.

Aphasia

A disruption in using and understanding language following neurological injury or disease that is not related to general intellectual decline or sensorimotor deficits.

Coma

A condition characterized by the lack of or minimal organized or purposeful response to external stimuli within one's environment.

Dementia

A chronic, progressive deterioration of memory and at least one other area such as attention, personality, communication ability, or executive functioning.

Fluency

Phrase length in the speech production of patients with aphasia, as well as characteristics of melodic line, articulatory agility, speech rate, and grammatical form.

Jargon

Production of entire sentences, in which all content words, and in some cases functor words as well, are replaced with neologisms.

Mild Cogn. Impairment (MCI)

Cognitive decline that is greater than that expected, given an individual's CA age and level of education.

Minimally Conscious State

A level of consciousness, often subsequent to coma or vegetative state, when there are minimal but distinct intermittent periods of self and environmental awareness.

Neglect Syndrome

A set of attention problems associated with predominantly right hemisphere damage (can occur following left hemisphere damage) in which patients are slow or inaccurate at reporting, reacting to, orienting to, or seeking out stimuli that are presented contralateral to the side of their brain damage.

Paragrammatism

Speech characterized by substitution of inappropriate syntactic elements.

Paraphasia

Error in naming.

Perseveration

Inappropriate repetition or persistence of a response, which may negatively affect completing communication and cognitive activities. Perseveration often affects a number of response modalities (spoken and written responses, manual responses).

Post-traumatic Amnesia (PTA)

An acute and commonly temporary phase of recovery from traumatic brain injury in which patients who have typically just emerged from coma are extremely confused, distractable, disoriented. Also referred to as posttraumatic confusion.

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA)

A degenerative condition generally associated with left hemisphere pathology and characterized by progressive impairment of comprehension, naming, speech fluency, and reading and writing skills, but relative sparing in other areas of cognition, at least in the initial stages of the degenerative condition.

Pure Word Deafness

Profound auditory comprehension deficits without evidence of impairment in other language functions or hearing sensitivity.

Social Cognition

One's knowledge of social rules and conventions, which guides interpretation of others' social actions, as well as generation of our own social actions and responses.

Subcortical aphasia

Aphasia resulting from damage to noncortical sites, such as the thalamus or basal ganglia, and characterized by various language impairments.

Theory of Mind

The ability of an individual to imagine the thoughts and feelings of another.

TBI

An insult to the brain produced by external forces that may cause a variety of temporary or permanent cognitive, emotional, and behavioral changes.