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Concept
Aphasiology
Summary
Aphasiology is the study of language impairment usually resulting from brain damage, due to neurovascular accident—hemorrhage, stroke—or associated with a variety of neurodegenerative diseases, including different types of dementia. These specific language deficits, termed aphasias, may be defined as impairments of language production or comprehension that cannot be attributed to trivial causes such as deafness or oral paralysis. A number of aphasias have been described, but two are best known: expressive aphasia (Broca's aphasia) and receptive aphasia (Wernicke's or sensory aphasia).
Acute aphasias are often the result of tissue damage following a stroke.
Expressive aphasia
First described by the French neurologist Paul Broca in the nineteenth century, expressive aphasia causes the speech of those affected to display a considerable vocabulary but to show grammatical deficits. It is characterized by a halting speech consisting mainly of content words, i.e. nouns and verbs, and, at least in English, distinctly lacking small grammatical function words such as articles and prepositions. This observation gave rise to the terms telegraphic speech and, more recently, agrammatism. The extent to which expressive aphasics retain knowledge of grammar is a matter of considerable controversy. Nonetheless, because their comprehension of spoken language is mostly preserved, and because their speech is usually good enough to get their point across, the agrammatic nature of their speech suggests that the disorder chiefly involves the expressive mechanisms of language that turn thoughts into well-formed sentences.
The view of expressive aphasia as an expressive disorder is supported by its frequent co-occurrence with facial motor difficulties, and its anatomical localization. Although expressive aphasia may be caused by brain damage to many regions, it is most commonly associated with the inferior frontal gyrus, a region that overlaps with motor cortex controlling the mouth and tongue, extending into the periventricular white matter.
Official source
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