Aphasia Is A Language Disorder

Aphasia is a communication disorder that affects many adults and families. Aphasia occurs as a result of damage to the language-specific areas of the brain (ASHA, 2014). Individuals with aphasia may experience difficulties with oral language, receptive language, memory, attention writing, and reading. There are a myriad of approaches designed for the treatment of aphasia. Two treatment approaches, Promoting Aphasics Communicative Effectiveness (P.A.C.E.) and Constraint Induced Language Therapy (C.I.L.T.), and their efficacy in regard to available evidence will be discussed below.

The study will allow both male and female participants presenting with aphasia over the age of 18. Participants must have experienced a first-ever cerebrovascular accident (CVA) to the left hemisphere and have no history of previous neurological damage, confirmed by magnetic resonance imagining (MRI). Individuals must be at least one-month post-onset of CVA, but the individual should still be in the sub-acute phase of recovery, thus, no more than a year post-onset. The participants will be evaluated using the Western Aphasia Battery Aphasia Quotient (AQ) (Kertesz, 1982) to determine the classification of aphasia, in which only the individuals with nonfluent aphasia will be permitted to participate in the study. Individuals with fluent aphasia often use spoken modalities filled with empty speech and jargon, therefore, in an attempt to limit confounding variables, they will not be included in the study. Additionally, individuals with nonfluent aphasia tend to have

Language is an ability that many of us take for granted in everyday life. For those with aphasia, it is a daily struggle to overcome and effective communication is a goal to strive for. Aphasia patients are able to think, perhaps as well as the average person, but they simply cannot convey their ideas or thoughts easily. The Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination is an excellent examination for the diagnosis of the presence and type of aphasia, and for the location of brain damage. The Minnesota Test for Differential Diagnosis of Aphasia has been shown to be the most comprehensive assessment of the overall patient’s strengths and weaknesses in regard to language; it also allows for physicians to predict recovery accurately. Though it is no longer as popular or applicable as newer diagnostic tests, such as the BDAE, it is still an accurate assessment for aphasia. I think this is the paradox in neurological assessment: as technological advances improve, older assessments are becoming invalidated- though they are not inaccurate assessments. New advances and knowledge are being acquired in medicine every day, therefore there is always room for improvement (Holland, 2008). One of the biggest cons to the two batteries I mentioned in this paper is the fact that they are both time consuming- for both the patient and the

3 Commonly, aphasia is one of the sequelae of strokes, and may have been even more prevalent in Halbwachs’s lifetime than it is in our own.

Aphasia is an acquired language disorder that affects a person’s ability to understand oral and written language, speaking and writing. It is estimated that one third of those who survive stroke have aphasia (Department of Health, 2007). Most patients with aphasia exhibit spontaneous recovery, usually in the first 2-3 months following stroke onset (Godecke, Hird, Lalor, Rai, & Phillips, 2012). However, 30-40% of these patients may experience long-term post-stroke aphasia (Bakheit et al., 2007). Continued rehabilitative treatments with the speech and language pathologists (SLPs) are not as significantly effective due to the current high demands on limited resources (Palmer et al., 2012), which reduced the availability of face-to-face speech

W.C., a 26 year 11 month old woman, was brought to the Florida Atlantic University-Communication Disorders Clinic (FAU-CDC) by her boyfriend for a Speech-Language Evaluation. She was referred to the FAU-CDC by her neurologist for word finding difficulties and a possible articulation disorder after a left hemisphere hemorrhagic stroke one month ago. According to her boyfriend, W.C.’s symptoms began immediately following her stroke and are characterized by word finding difficulties, slowed and choppy speech, and mispronunciation of certain consonants that is affecting intelligibility along with a strained voice.

A contributing factor to this is how difficult it is for people with aphasia to produce sentences that flow smoothly and to connect their sentences. Computer software is helpful in speech therapy because it allows the patients to be able to record themselves speaking, replay it so they can hear exactly what they sound like, and be able to string together partial sentences. This computer program helps the patient produce sentences as they are being formulated. The goal of this program is to “investigate the utility of a two-step treatment that supplements improvements achieved from the use of the software with explicit structural treatment.” (Aphasiology 2009). The results of this study show that this specific approach improves the speech of patients suffering from aphasia, even chronic and non-fluent

Human beings occasionally suffer bad damage to particular parts of their brains. Unfortunately, these injuries may lead to major failure of speech production, understanding language and comprehension which most of the patients suffer it permanently. This impairment is called Aphasia. Gayle (2012) states that people with aphasia fail to understand sentence comprehension although it is a simple sentence. She also mentioned that aphasia patients also have difficulty in reading and understanding speeches. According to Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams (2011), aphasia is a scientific term used to explained language disorder due to brain injuries caused by diseases or trauma. In other words, aphasia involves partial or total loss of the ability to

Imagine a life where someone could not force words to come out of his or her mouth, even if he knew what he wanted to say. Such is the life for people who suffer from Broca’s aphasia. Broca’s aphasia is a speech disorder where the Broca’s area in the brain’s left frontal lobe malfunctions, resulting in the inability for a patient to form the necessary movements of the muscles for speech production. This type of non-verbal aphasia is often referenced as motor aphasia because of the lack of motor skills in the brain for speech production. Thousands of people suffer from this disorder, and as a result communication between these people and society is incredibly difficult. Although each person experiences Broca’s aphasia differently, there are

Chapter 16 of Musicaphilia, called Speech and Song: Music and Aphasia, highlighted how patients with aphasia were able to memorize sequences or entire songs, and how this in turn helped improve their language and communication skills. I found it fascinating that aphasia patients could learn language through music, especially when individuals such as Samuel S. were able to answer with appropriate responses to questions after being deemed as a hopeless case. Often it’s easy to forget the complexity that goes into simply speaking to others, down to the simple phonemes we have that create full words. What works with music therapy is the frequent interaction between the patient and their therapist, which is vital in improving their language usage. This interaction includes using “physical contact, gesture, imitation of movement, and prosody” which demonstrates just how much nonverbal communication goes into face-to-face interaction (219). Support and encouragement

Aphasia is a language disorder that results from damage to portions of the brain that are responsible for language. For most people, these are parts of the left side (hemisphere) of the brain. Aphasia usually occurs suddenly, often as the result of a stroke or head injury, but it may also develop slowly, as in the case of a brain tumor. The disorder impairs the expression and understanding of language as well as reading and writing. “Aphasia may co-occur with speech disorders such as dysarthria or apraxia of speech, which also result from brain damage”. (Sarno 23)

Aphasia is a language disorder that can be the result of a brain injury. An individual that is suffering from aphasia may experience difficulty speaking, writing, reading, or comprehending. There are three different types of Aphasia that differ in various ways. First, Wernicke’s Aphasia is the inability to grasp the meaning of words and sentences that have been produced by another individual. This type of aphasia is also known as “fluent aphasia” or “receptive aphasia”. Wernicke patients’ speech may come across like a jumble of words or jargon, but it is very well articulated and they have no issue producing their own connected speech. If the patient is consecutively making errors, it is common for them to be unaware of their difficulties, and not realize that their sentences don’t make sense. The severity of the disorder varies depending on the patient, and the disorder results form damage in the left posterior temporal region of the brain, which is also known as Wernicke’s area.

Agnosia is a neurological illness most often caused by dementia, strokes, or other neurological diseases but can also be the result of a trauma such as a head injury or infection. Sigmund Freud first proposed the term “Agnosia” in 1891 but, before then, Carl Wernicke, who discovered aphasia, was the first to have some of the ideas of what later became agnosia. In 1877, Kussmaul attempted to reveal the cause of Auditory Verbal Agnosia, commonly known as word deafness. Kussmaul believed that lesions on the left Supramarginal and Angular Gyrus, directly above Wernicke’s area, triggered word deafness.

This article examines in a deeper context the impact melodic intonation therapy (MIT) has towards individuals with aphasia. The author states that MIT consists of three levels which become for complex as levels increase. The author examines the tree different levels of MIT which include “musically intoned phrases and multisyllabic words for the first two levels and phonologically complex sentences for the third level” eventually a proses it has to be completed in other for the individual with aphasia can finally speck normally and fluently. The author indicates the MIT continues to be widely used because if its positive effects if used with right candidates. Treatment using intonation patterns to increase the length of phrases and sentences.

The purpose of this paper is to pursue one important and fundamental aim: language and the brain are purely inseparable since it allows us to perform essential tasks such as generating, comprehending and expressing speech. With damage to the brain, individuals can no longer perform such tasks which can ultimately lead to many types of language disorders. The focus of this paper is Broca’s aphasia, a language disorder characterized by the inability to produce written and spoken speech. Damage to the brain can cause many types of speech impairments as well as comprehension deficits.