Understanding aphasia

Aphasia causes

• Acquired language impairment affecting comprehension + expression

3 neuropsych areas assessed for aphasia diagnosis (not crucial)

1. Fluency: rate, ease prosody + grammatical speech elements

2. Repetition: ability to echo words/phrases

3. Auditory comprehension: ability to decode + understand spoken lang.

Types of aphasia

• Non-fluent

• Fluent

Non-fluent aphasia: lesioned areas + effect

• Anterior frontal regions

  • Includes premotor areas for motor planning

• → speech becomes slow + effortful

2 examples of non-fluent aphasia

• Broca’s aphasia

• Global aphasia

Broca’s area function (1)

Controls speech production, motor articulation, and grammatical structure

Broca’s aphasia description: effect on 3 domains (1→1, 1, 1→2)

• Fluency significantly impaired

  • Agrammatism: omitting function words like articles + prepositions

• Repetition impaired

• Auditory comprehension intact for simple sentences

  • Asyntactic comprehension struggles for complex sentences

  • Motor speech planning deficits: apraxia of speech

Global aphasia description (1), effect on 3 domains

Most severe form

• Fluency: sig. impaired

  • Virtually absent speech output

  • Or limited automatisms (“I don’t know”)

• Repetition: sig. impaired

• Comprehension: sig. impaired

Fluent aphasia: lesioned brain regions, effect

• Posterior temporal-parietal brain regions

• → fluent, smooth speech but with compromised content

2 examples of fluent aphasia

• Wernicke’s aphasia

• Conduction aphasia

Wernicke’s area function (1)

Manages language comprehension and the meaning of words

Wernicke’s aphasia: how 3 domains are affected

• Fluency: unimpaired

• Repetition: sig. impaired

• Comprehension: sig. impaired

Wernicke’s aphasia description: 4 terms w defs

• Logorrhea: excessive flow of uninhibited speech

• Semantic paraphasias: substituting incorrect words

• Phonemic paraphasias: sound errors

• Anosognosia: lack of awareness of speech errors

Transcortical aphasias (non-fluent and fluent)

• Fluency: impaired

• Repetition: intact

• Comprehension: impaired