Aphasia and communication disorders

Question 1

Aphasia

Answer 1

impairment in language processing resulting from brain injury or disease

Question 2

Symptoms of aphasia

Answer 2

difficulty with expressive (e.g. speaking) and/or receptive (e.g. understanding) communication, reading, writing

Question 3

Misconceptions of aphasia

Answer 3

vocabulary loss, dysarthria (slurring), vocal chord damage, hearing problem

Question 4

Characteristics of Broca’s aphasia

Answer 4

non-fluent, effortful and halting speech, compensatory behaviors (e.g. gestures, circumlocution, generic word substitutions), preserved comprehension

Question 5

Circumlocution

Answer 5

describing things instead of identifying them

Question 6

Characteristics of Wernicke’s aphasia

Answer 6

fluent but nonsensical (e.g. uses neologisms or made-up words) impaired comprehension, poor awareness of deficits

Question 7

4 kinds of speech errors in aphasia

Answer 7

anomic errors, phonemic and semantic paraphasias, neologisms

Question 8

Anomic errors

Answer 8

failure to name or retrieve names, common and proper nouns

Question 9

Phonemic paraphasias

Answer 9

a person says a word that sounds like the target word but is unrelated; more common in Wernicke’s

Question 10

Semantic paraphasias

Answer 10

a person says a word that is related to the target word but doesn’t sound like it; more common in Wernicke’s

Question 11

Speech apraxia

Answer 11

disruption in the phasing of movements involved in speech often accompanied by Broca’s aphasia

Question 12

Characteristics of speech apraxia

Answer 12

slow speech rate, segmentation of syllables, trial-and-error articulatory movements, increased difficulty with increased length and complexity of utterances

Question 13

Aprosodia

Answer 13

inability to express and/or understand the emotive content of spoken language (e.g. difficulty with sarcasm)

Question 14

What is aprosodia associated with?

Answer 14

right frontoparietal (inability to express) or right temporoparietal (inability to comprehend)

Question 15

Possible causes of aprosodia

Answer 15

stroke, alzheimer’s, TBI, schizophrenia

Question 16

Alexia or acquired dyslexia

Answer 16

difficulty reading that is usually accompanied by difficulty writing (agrapia) and aphasia with errors depending on lesion location

Question 17

4 types of alexia

Answer 17

alexia without agraphia, surface alexia, phonological alexia, deep alexia

Question 18

Alexia without agraphia

Answer 18

slow letter-by-letter reading but no agraphia

Question 19

Lesion resulting in alexia without agraphia

Answer 19

left primary visual cortex and the splenium of the corpus callosum

Question 20

Surface alexia

Answer 20

difficulty reading and spelling irregular words

Question 21

Lesion resulting in surface alexia

Answer 21

left temporoparietal (angular gyrus)

Question 22

Phonological alexia

Answer 22

difficulty sounding out words

Question 23

Lesion resulting in phonological alexia

Answer 23

left temporoparietal (angular gyrus)

Question 24

Deep alexia

Answer 24

semantic paralexic errors when reading

Question 25

Lesion resulting in deep alexia

Answer 25

large left hemisphere lesions

Question 26

Treatments for aphasia

Answer 26

speech-language therapy targeting functional communication; constraint-induced aphasia therapy; melodic intonation therapy; technology-facilitated; aphasia-friendly documents and signs (e.g. pictures)