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Aphasias

Aphasia is a class of language disorders, ranging from having difficulty remembering words to being completely unable to speak. They can often develop from and/or be a sign of stroke, brain injury, tumor, infection, or dementia.The type of aphasia can signal which area of the brain is affected.

Some types of aphasias are:

• Broca’s aphasia - an expressive aphasia, arising from damage to the area of the brain called Broca’s area - speech is difficult to initiate, non-fluent and appears labored. A sentence such as “I went to the hospital” would likely appear to take great effort to produce, and may sounds like “I…ah…went…ah….to….ah….the….ah….hospital”
• Wernicke’s aphasia - a receptive aphasia indicating damage to the area of the brain known as Wernicke’s area - though the person can put words together fine and have normal intonation and sound to their speech, it will not make sense - they may use words that do not exist, or produce “word salad”, which is stringing together a bunch of words in a way that do not make sense. While they are speaking like this, they will have normal intonation in their speech and their words will flow together normally. They may say something like “Cat talk the under book”. Curiously, they maintain the ability to sing or recite something memorized.
• Global aphasia - is the result of a large area of damage resulting in a combination of Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia

These disorders are different that Dysarthria, which is a motor speech disorder, in which the muscles of the mouth and tongue do not function properly.