Aphasia - Paper

Expressive (motor) Aphasia is a neurological condition that occurs when words cannot be formed, expressed, or may be absent due to an injury to the cerebral cortex. (Brooks & Brooks, 2012).

Expressive aphasia is the loss of ability to convey one’s thoughts through speech or writing. A patient with expressive aphasia knows what they want to say but have trouble finding the words that is needed to state what they mean. Some of the symptoms that is shown by a person with expressive aphasia are slow speech, spelling or grammatical errors, have trouble getting certain

Aphasia on the other hand is a communication disorder where the person struggles to understand words and speech. Patients on an aphasia ward were caught laughing at the presidents’ speech confusing staff. This is because despite not understanding words or meanings, tone is preserved and even often enhanced in aphasiacs. (Henry Head, 1926, cited in Sacks, 1998, p.86).

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

6 monolingual English speakers between the ages of 39 and 84 with aphasia from Austin, TX hospitals. All had left-hemisphere stroke, stroke onset at least 6 months before, were right-handed, had high school diploma, and normal vision and

Aphasia can cause problems with speaking, listening, reading, writing, understanding speech, and thinking of words when speaking or writing. The exact symptoms involved with a particular patient depends on the type and severity of the injury to the brain. It affects about 20 percent of stroke patients.

The topic of this annotated bibliography is communicating with people who have Aphasia. Aphasia is neurological condition that occurs when the tissues in the left hemisphere of the brain that are responsible for speech, reading and writing are impaired (National Institute of Neurological Disorders, 2013). The main signs of this disorder are: trouble in articulating oneself when speaking, difficulty understanding speech, and problems with reading and writing. Aphasia is usually caused by a stroke, severe head trauma, brain tumors, and brain infections (National Institute of Neurological Disorders, 2013). Aspasia is more common in elderly individuals, The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) states that Aphasia will occur in 15% percent of persons under the age of 65 and will increase to 43% for people that are 85 years of age and older (National Institute of Neurological Disorders, 2013).

After the first year of aphasia resulting from stroke, researchers believe that spontaneous recovery even with intensive therapies will be unlikely. There are few studies which have documented the results of post-stroke language functions after 12 months. Traditional language therapies also focus on utilizing compensatory communication strategies with a focus on immediate communication needs for each patient. Initial strategies used included gesturing, drawing, writing, and AAC systems with the expectation that these assistive modalities will be decreased as verbal language function improves. Scientists have begun to question if using these types of techniques could contribute to a learned non-use phenomenon. Thus, this study purposes to discover if restraining non-verbal communication in aphasia patients can result in better verbal language outcomes in the future.

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)

In my interview, Michelle described Lisa’s features of Aphasia that were similar to existing studies done on stroke victims that also suffer from aphasia. Symptoms of her language disorder were more prominent during the first year after her stroke, but through intensive therapies she has benefited in her communication abilities. Michelle explains that right after the stroke, her daughter suffered from a period of not speaking at all. She experienced mild paralyzation in the right side of her body and had great difficulties swallowing. After a few weeks, her swallowing ability recovered on its own, and she started speaking again but could not put together a whole sentence. Lisa admits the struggle to find her words was the most frustrating part,

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.

After suffering from a stroke, many victims go through rehabilitation to help regain the language skills they lost from their stroke. Specific abilities that are lost or impaired are speech and language skills, which result in acquiring aphasia. In 2001, constraint induced aphasia therapy (CIAT) was introduced by Friedemann Pulvermuller. It is a therapeutic technique that allows one to achieve their individual vocational communication needs. CIAT is known to be one of the most successful forms of therapy for aphasiac patients with promising and positive outcomes. Because of CIAT’s stringent treatment structure, one’s brain is trained to use its cognitive and vocational abilities that may have been damaged during the stroke. CIAT requires patients to use spoken language instead of other forms of nonverbal communication that they naturally want to use. Unlike many other forms of therapy, CIAT helps one to expand their expressive output abilities and their personal language production skills. Although stroke rehabilitation does not entirely restore brain damage, constraint induced aphasia therapy can significantly help one achieve their vocational communication needs again.

A sample of spontaneous speech was obtained through the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination and by asking patients to talk about their last holiday. Speech was analyzed including number of words produced per minute, number of speech production errors per minute, length of word-finding pauses, and range of nouns and verbs used.

Nearly one million individuals within the United States experience aphasia resulting from a storke. According to the American Heart Association, strokes are the third leading cause of death in the United States. They are often referred to as a cerebrovascular accident (CVA). This occurs when the blood flow to the brain has been either stopped or interrupted. The deprivation of blood flow and oxygen to the brain results in a stroke. Around 41.2 percent of individuals who suffered from a stroke will have aphasia (Guyomard et al., 2009). Aphasia is a deficit in language abilities resulting from the brain (Manasco,2014). Aphasia is broken down into, two categories fluent and non-fluent. Individuals with aphasia typically suffer from anomia.

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.