Aphasia key terms Flashcards
Aphasia
Aphasia is an acquired language disorder that is caused by a unilateral, localized brain lesion after the period of language development.
It is a disorder in the production and comprehension of spoken and written language
Causes- stroke
- Cerebrovascular accident (CVA) i.e. STROKE- causes around 85 per cent of aphasia cases.
1st kind of stroke= infarction caused by thrombosis (blood clot in artery supplying brain with oxygen)
2nd kind= haemorrhage (rupture in an artery supplying the brain)
Causes- Traumatic Brain Injury
2nd most common cause. Within TBI, a distinction is made between open and closed head injury.
This distinction refers to whether or not the skull is damaged. Open head injuries bring a risk of complications due to infection that add to the severity of the condition.
Causes- Tumour
The tumour will press on healthy brain tissue as it grows. If this tissue is involved in language, then aphasia is
the result.
Causes- infection
in the brain,
least common cause of aphasia. E.g. meningitis or encephalitis
Phonemic paraphasias
One or
more phonemes of the target word are substituted (e.g. ‘diger’
instead of ‘tiger’), omitted (e.g. ‘tain’ instead of ‘train’), transposed (e.g.
‘sarmaphy’ instead of ‘pharmacy’) or added (e.g. ‘ancknowledge’ instead
of ‘acknowledge’).
Word finding problems can occur in spontaneous speech in the following ways:
speech is characterized by a lack of explicit information
(‘empty speech’), because a relatively large number of content words
(nouns, verbs and adjectives) are omitted.
The aphasic individual hesitates and blocks before key words
The aphasic speaker produces verbal paraphasias (word substitutions)- can be related in meaning to the target word e.g.
‘boy’ instead of ‘girl’. This is called a semantic paraphasia OR, if there
is no relation with the target word, irrelevant or unrelated paraphasia.
Grammatical problems- agrammatism
impoverished sentence structure and simplifi cation of the grammatical
structure- agrammatic speech usually slow and effortful, short sentences of mainly content words
paragrammatism
Erratic application
of the grammatical rules. Although paragrammatic speech is fluent, and sentences are long and syntactically complex, they are often incorrectly structured. Paragrammatic speakers often use many phonemic and verbal paraphasis.
stereotypes (expressive symptom)
the aphasic speaker produces a word, phrase or sentence more frequently than normal e.g. ‘and so on’ ‘what’s the name?’
speech automatism
A word or phrase that is repeated over and over again, but which
is not communicatively appropriate
recurring utterances
similar to speech automatisms, but are non-words that are continuously repeated. They usually have simple
structure consisting of a vowel and a consonant, consonant clusters are hardly ever observed. Examples are
‘popopo’ or ‘tatatata’.
echolalia
aphasic speaker repeats the words or sentence of the conversational partner.
sually parts of a sentence
are repeated as an answer to a question:
Conversation partner: Did you sleep well last night?
Aphasic speaker: Slept well last night
perservation
perseveration can occur at the sound level (e.g. ‘ki-ki-king’) the word level (e.g. the aphasic individual first names his nose correctly,
but then refers to his eye and ear with ‘nose’ as well.
Broca’s aphasia characteristics
Effortful articulation, reduced vocabulary and grammatical limitation resulting in very
simple sentences and stereotypical constructions and poor comprehension of grammatically complex sentences
Naming of objects, auditory comprehension of single words/simple
sentences and silent reading are usually hardly affected.
