- Any language deficit caused by damage to the brain (e.g. bullet, stroke, infection, etc.)
- Almost always caused by left hemisphere damage
- Many aphasics can still swear
- Most right hemisphere damaged patients do not swear at all and often cannot
Broca’s aphasia
- Broca’s area
- Speech production
- Articulation
- Use of grammar
- “Expressive” aphasia
- Disfluent, halting speech
- Speech contain only content words, with general lack of inflections, function words (= agrammatic speech)
- Comprehension generally good
- Problems with passive sentences
Wernicke’s aphasia
- Wernicke’s area
- Speech comprehension
- Semantics (meaning)
- Selection of words from mental lexicon
- “Receptive” aphasia
- Speech is fluent but semantically incoherent
- Lexical errors, unnecessary words, nonsense words, circumlocutions
- Comprehension is poor