Monday, December 10, 2012

Broca's Aphasia by Afua Woode

Aphasia as defined perfectly by the online dictionary is the partial or total loss of the ability to articulate ideas or comprehend spoken or written language, resulting from damage to the brain caused by injury or disease. Now there are different kinds of aphasia's such as broca's aphasia, then we also have wernicke's aphasia. In this blog I'd like to focus on broca's aphasia. This type of aphasia is the most common of the nonfluent aphasia's. It is also known as the verbal aphasia but derived its name Broca named after Paul Broca. Paul Broca was a French physician. The principal output from Broca's area is to cell columns in the tongue and face areas of the precentral gyrus. The lesion that causes Broca's aphasia affects the third frontal convolution which is both the gyrus and the sulcus of the left frontal lobe, the location called the Broca's area. Someone diagnosed with this will see symptoms like difficulty in forming words and slowed speech. If words are basic and overlearned, it may come out smoothly. In extreme cases, the patient may only be able to produce single word because word finding becomes impaired. Typically there is better recovery of language function in Broca's aphasia than in any of the other aphasia syndromes.
 

This man has Broca's aphasia and his speech (for the most part) is limited to a combination of the word "tono" and various voice inflections.
He is briefly able to use other words when he is asked to count to 20 towards the end of the video.

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