Language, Aphasia and Frontal Lobe Flashcards
What is an aphasia?
Aphasia is an acquired disturbance of the comprehension and formulation of language caused by dysfunction in specific brain regions
What are the main diseases underlying aphasia?
- Developmental disorders (dyslexia), genetic disorders (FoxP2 gene anomaly -> SLI
- Cerebro-vascular disease (stroke), traumatic brain injury, operations
- Infectious disease (herpes-encephalitis), tumors (astrocytoma), degenerative diseases (AD, FLTD, Pick’s disease)
How do the underlying diseases define the time course of aphasia?
Compared to normal language competence:
*developmental disease - never reaching full competence
*acute lesions (stroke, traumas) - sudden loss of language competence, then (most often) gradual recovery
*tumors, degenerative and infectious diseases - gradual decline
What are the charasteristics of Broca’s aphasia (BA 45)?
- non-fluent
- effortful
- agrammatism
- phonematic paraphasias
- combination with AOS (apraxia of speech)/ Dysarthria
What are the charasterictis of Wernicke’s aphasia (BA 22)?
- fluent / logorrhoic
- paragrammatism
- semantic/ phonematic paraphasias
- Neologisms
- repetitions
- comprehension impaired
What aphasia does this person most probably have?
* “Walk dog” meaning “I will take the dog for a walk”
* “book book two table” meaning “There are two books on the table”
Broca’s aphasia (non-fluent, agrammatic)
What aphasia does this person most probably have?
“You know that smoodle pinkered and that I want to get him round and take care of him like you want before”
Wernicke’s aphasia (fluent, paragrammatic)
What are the main vantage points for dissociating Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia
Broca’s vs. Wernicke’s
motor (motor areas, planning motor speech movements) - sensory (sensory = phonematic image of spoken words)
expressive (deficits in production) - receptive (deficits in understanding)
anterior (BA 45, frontal lobe) - posterior (BA 22, temporal lobe)
What is agrammatism?
Agrammatism is difficulty with using basic grammar and syntax, or word order and sentence structure.
Yeah…Wednesday, …Paul and dad…Hospital…yeah…doctors, two…an’ teeth.
Preserved ability to use “content” words like nouns and verbs, while difficulty
- using function words like articles, prepositions, auxiliary verbs
- inflecting words
- putting words in the right order (passive vs. active voice, questions)
What is paragrammatism?
Paragrammatism is a symptom of aphasia consisting of substitutions, reversals, or omissions of sounds or syllables within words or reversals of words within sentences; the misuse of grammar not attributable to an overall reduction of grammatical morphemes or simplification of syntactic structure.
“I’m very want it.”; “And I want everything to be so talk.”
Mind the prodigious output of paragrammatic patients, leading to “confused sentence monsters”
What other types of aphasia can be differentiated?
- amnestic - repetition of words/phrases good; word finding difficulties
- global - severe expressive and receptive language impairment
- conduction - word finding difficulties; difficulty repeating phrases
- transcortical motor - strong repetition skills; difficulty spontaneously answering questions
- transcortical sensory - repetition of
words/phrases good; even repeating questions rather than answering them (“echolalia”)
What is language?
Language is a formal system
- of signs
- governed by grammatical rules of combination
- to communicate meaning.
What is apraxia?
Apraxia is a neurological disorder of learnt directed motor control, which cannot be explained by deficits of the basic sensori-motor system
What is ideatoric apraxia?
It is the inability to correctly order or sequence a series of movements to achieve a goal. It is a disturbance in an overall ideational action plan.
=>
Plan of action is abnormal – apraxia of action consequences
What is ideomotoric apraxia
It is a disorder traditionally characterized by deficits in properly performing tool-use pantomimes (e.g., pretending to use a hammer) and communicative gestures (e.g., waving goodbye).
=> Realisation of plan is abnormal
