Week 1 - Intro & Classical Aphasias Flashcards
What is aphasia?
-an impairment of the ability to produce, comprehend, or repeat language that results from an acquired brain injury, such as a stroke, tumor, head injury, or progressive degenerative disease
1836 Marc Dax first notices association between …
left hemisphere disease and aphasia
1861 Broca describes virtually speechless patients Leborgne and Lelong and finds damage at autopsy in what section of the brain?
left inferior frontal
Where is Broca’s area? What is its function?
-region in the frontal lobe of the left cerebral hemisphere with functions linked to speech production
1874 Carl Wernicke describes Wernicke’s aphasia as what?
-fluent but semantically incoherent and often phonologically distorted speech production, severely impaired auditory comprehension and unawareness of errors linked to posterior superior and middle temporal gyri lesions.
Where is Wernicke’s area? What is its function?
- located in the posterior section of the superior temporal gyrus in the left cerebral hemisphere.
- This area encircles the auditory cortex on the lateral sulcus the (part of the brain where the temporal lobe and parietal lobe meet).
- involved in production of written and spoken language
List the eight classic aphasias:
- Broca’s aphasia, Wernicke’s aphasia, Conduction aphasia, Global aphasia, Anomic aphasia,
- Transcortical aphasias: transcortical motor aphasia, transcortical sensory aphasia, transcortical mixed aphasia
How do we test speech?
Behavioural:
- testing speech production
- speech comprehension
- repetition
Imaging:
- magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
- CT scan
What is Broca’s aphasia? Discuss production, comprehension and repetition.
Production:
- Nonfluent, possibly apraxia or dysarthria
- Formulaic expressions
- Verb finding harder than noun finding
- Closed-class elements impaired
- Reduced syntactic complexity
Comprehension:
•Relatively preserved
•Poor comprehension of complex syntax, reversed word order
Repetition:
- Disrupted
- Multiword sequences hard •Closed-class items hard
What is Wernicke’s aphasia? Discuss production, comprehension and repetition.
Production: •Fluent •Phonemic paraphasias, jargon •Morphological substitutions •Patients often unaware
Comprehension:
•Sentences and phrases impaired
•Even words may be impaired
Repetition
•Disrupted
•Errors of word choice, phonology, grammar
What is Conduction aphasia? Discuss production, comprehension and repetition.
Production:
•More fluent than Broca’s aphasia, less fluent than Wernicke’s aphasia
•Phonemic paraphasias
•Recurrent attempts to produce desired phonological form
Comprehension:
•Relatively preserved
•Possible difficulties with long sentences with high STM load
Repetition:
•Disrupted
•Multi-word sequences disrupted
•Sometimes even single words disrupted
What is Global aphasia? Discuss production, comprehension and repetition.
Production: •Severely impaired Comprehension: •Severely impaired Repetition: •Severely impaired
What is Anomic aphasia? Discuss production, comprehension and repetition.
Production:
•Fluent with hesitations
•Marked word-finding difficulties
•Sometimes some word categories worse than others
Comprehension:
•Relatively preserved
Repetition:
•Relatively preserved
What is Transcortical motor aphasia? Discuss production, comprehension and repetition.
Production:
-Poor planning and initiation
Comprehension:
-Relatively preserved
Repetition:
-good
Kemmerer (2015). List 5 problems with aphasia syndromes:
- criteria based on communication behaviours (production, comprehension, repetition) rather than language structure: phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax, semantics
- symptoms in real life matter of degree rather than present/ absent
- criteria based on collections of symptoms that do not always co-occur
- deficit-lesion correlations hard to establish: lesions often more extensive; sometimes do not include critical region
- symptoms are not always stable over time: acute aphasia often different from chronic aphasia, diagnosis changes
