Wernicke's Aphasia Disorder Essay

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.

(2) Progressive non-fluent aphasia (PNFA) is characterised by problems with speech production. Individuals may struggle to find the correct words when engaging in conversation. Often individuals will struggle to pronounce words correctly (especially if they have more than two syllables), and their speech will lack appropriate grammar. Problems understanding speech can also be present, especially if the sentence contains complex grammar.

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).

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

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

Nearly one million individuals within the United States experience aphasia resulting from a stroke. The website for the American Heart Association states that 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). Manasco (2014) stated that aphasia is a deficit in language abilities resulting from the brain. It is broken down into, two categories fluent and non-fluent. Individuals with aphasia typically suffer from anomia. This is a condition where word retrieval (anomia) is difficult. “Most unimpaired individuals do not need to put forth any effort to express themselves verbally. However,

Expressive aphasia, also known as Broca’s aphasia, impairs the way in which a person’s language is produced. Although this type of aphasia impairs a person’s ability to speak, they are still able to use the other aspects of language, such as comprehending when someone is speaking to them. Broca’s aphasia may cause long pauses between words, this is called dysprosody, and leaving out important words or endings of words, which is known as agrammatism. This type of aphasia occurs when there is traumatic damage to what is referred to as the Broca’s area of the brain. Treatment of Broca’s aphasia is done by a Speech Language Pathologist, and is different for each person depending on their specific needs. Receptive aphasia, known as Wernicke’s aphasia, impairs one’s ability to understand themselves and others. The way that they speak is barely comprehensible; this is known as logorrhea. Patients with Wernicke’s aphasia may have something called anosagnosia, which makes them believe that what they are saying is being understood. This type of aphasia makes it very difficult for SLP’s to treat because of the anosognosia. Wernicke’s aphasia is caused by damage to what is known as the Wernicke’s area of the

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).

This is when the sufferer cannot find the correct word for what they intend. Often aphasia does not develop until the sufferer has reached the second stage of the disease (estimated to be last between 4 and 10 years after the first symptoms) (Devinsky & D'Esposito, 2004). Alzheimer’s disease is not the only cause for aphasia, and it affects patients in different severity levels. Aphasia is clear to recognise as you can detect it by simply conversing with the patient, however differentiating between it being caused by Alzheimer’s disease or another condition (e.g. semantic dementia) can prove more difficult. A study was carried out (Libon et al., 2013) where 57 patients with Alzheimer’s disease, 15 with semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and 35 healthy seniors (used as the control group). They were asked to carry out a number of tasks such as categorizing words. They were shown a basic word on a card (e.g. ‘tree’), and then the experimenter would say a category (e.g. ‘nature’). The participant was required to reply ‘yes’ or ‘no’ depending on if the word related to the category. The task was repeated using picture images of the words instead, so the participant would be shown the image of a tree instead for example. Both the experimental groups (the Alzheimer’s patients and the semantic variant PPA patients) showed a significant deficiency in word processing from the task. MRI

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

Each year according to National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke more than 700,000 Americans suffer a stroke and about 160,000 die from stroke-related causes. In early 2011 at the American Stroke Association it was reported that the incidence of stroke has rose 51% among men and 17% among women aged fifteen though thirty-four years between 1994-1995 and 2006-2007.

Mesulum (2003) defined primary progressive aphasia as a clinical disorder with gradual onset and progressive dissolution in an individuals' language skills which could be attributed to the degeneration of the frontotemporal region of the brain. According to the American Speech-Language and Hearing Association, (2015) Primary Progressive Apahsia is described as focal dementia which characterized by gradual loss of language function with relatively well unaffected memory skills, and visual processing skills until the later stages

Five of the 6 demonstrated semantic impairments on 4 subtests of the Psycholinguistic Assessment of Language Processing in Aphasia rest (PALMPA) and the Pyramids and Palm Trees test (PAPT), demonstrating lexical retrieval impairment and not phonological output lexicon impairment.

Individuals with Wernicke's aphasia may speak in long sentences that have no meaning, add unnecessary words, and even create new "words." For example, someone with Wernicke's aphasia may say, "You know that smoodle pinkered and that I want to get him round and take care of him like you want before," meaning "The dog needs to go out so I will take him for a walk." (Eiesenson 45) “Individuals with Wernicke's aphasia usually have great difficulty understanding speech and are therefore often unaware of their mistakes”. (Eiesenson 53) “These individuals usually have no body weakness because their brain injury is not near the parts of the brain that control movement”. (Eiesenson 74)

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.