B13-Human Communication Flashcards
Aphasia
Difficulty in producing or comprehending speech not produced by deafness or a simple motor deficit; caused by brain damage.
Broca’s aphasia
A form of aphasia characterized by agrammatism, anomia, and extreme difficulty in speech articulation.
Function word
A preposition, article, or other word that conveys little of the meaning of a sentence but its important in specifying its grammatical structure.
Content word
A noun, verb, adjective, or adverb that conveys meaning.
Broca’s area
A region of frontal cortex, located just rostral to the base of the left primary motor cortex, that is necessary for normal speech production.
Agrammatism
One of the usual symptons of Broca’s aphasia; a difficulty in comprehending or properly employinng grammatical devices, such as verb endings and word order.
Anomia
Difficulty in finding (remembering) the appropriate word to describe an object, action, or attribute; one of the symptoms of aphasia.
Wernicke’s area
A region of the auditory association cortex on the left temporal lobe of humans, which is important in the comprehension of words and the production of meaningful speech.
Wernicke’s aphasia
A form of aphasia characterized by poor speech comprehension and fluent but meaningless speech.
Pure word deafness
The ability to hear, to speak, and (usually) to read and write without being able to comprehend the meaning of speech; caused by damage to Wernicke’s area or disruption of auditory input to this region.
Transcortical sensory aphasia
A speech disorder in which a person has difficulty comprehending speech and producing meaningful spontaneous speech but can repeat speech; caused by damage to the region of the brain posterior to Wernicke’s area.
Arcuate Fasciculus
A bundle of axons that connects Wernicke’s area with Broca’s area; damage causes conduction aphasia.
Conduction aphasia
An aphasia characterized by an inability to repeat words that are heard but the ability to speak normally and comprehend the speech of others.
Circumlocution
A strategy by which people with anomia find alternative ways to say something when they are unable to think of the most appropriate word.
Prosody
The use of changes in intonation and emphasis to convey meaning in speech besides that specified by the particular words; an important means of communication of emotion.
Pure alexia
Loss of the ability to read without loss of the ability to write; produced by brain damage.
Whole-word reading
Reading by recognizing a word as a whole; “sight reading”.
Phonetic reading
Reading by decoding the phonetic significance of letter strings; “sound reading.”
Surface dyslexia
A reading disorder in which a person can read words phonetically but has difficulty reading irregularly spelled words by the whole-word method.
Phonological dyslexia
A reading disorder in which a person can read familiar words but has difficulty reading unfamiliar words or pronounceable nonwords.
Visual word-form area (VWFA)
A region of the left fusiform gyrus on the base fo the temporal lobe; plays a critical role in whole-word recognition.
Direct dyslexia
A language disorder caused by brain damage in which the person can read words aloud without understanding them.
Developmental dyslexias
Specific reading disorders that appear to have a genetic (and hence biological) component.
Phonological dysgraphia
A writing disorder in which the person cannot sound out words and write them phonetically.
