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In aphasia (sometimes called dysphasia), [a] a person may be unable to comprehend or unable to formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions. [2] The major causes are stroke and head trauma; prevalence is hard to determine, but aphasia due to stroke is estimated to be 0.1–0.4% in the Global North. [3]
Patients with Wernicke's aphasia demonstrate fluent speech, which is characterized by typical speech rate, intact syntactic abilities and effortless speech output. [3] Writing often reflects speech in that it tends to lack content or meaning. In most cases, motor deficits (i.e. hemiparesis) do not occur in individuals with Wernicke's aphasia. [4]
A typical patient with Broca's aphasia will misinterpret "the man is bitten by the dog" by switching the subject and object to "the dog is bitten by the man." [14] Typically, people with expressive aphasia can understand speech and read better than they can produce speech and write. [8]
The test also discerns a person's strengths and weaknesses, which can be used to treat the person better. Therapists should customize their treatment for each patient. The main focus for during speech therapy for conduction aphasia person is to strengthen correct word usage and auditory comprehension. A major goal is to focus on repetition. [19]
Speech therapy is not a cure for the aphasia, but instead helps patients use skills that remain intact. [5] When considering the prognosis for individuals with aphasia it is necessary to consider internal factors, patient specific factors, and external factors as these factors are considered most critical to post-stroke recovery. [ 17 ]
However, it is rare for patients to have just one of these problems and most people will present with more than one problem. Features include: [2] Hesitant, effortful speech; Apraxia of speech; Stutter (including return of a childhood stutter) Anomic aphasia (word retrieval failures) Phonemic paraphasia (sound errors in speech e.g. 'gat' for 'cat')
Auditory verbal agnosia can be referred to as a pure aphasia because it has a high degree of specificity. Despite an inability to comprehend speech, patients with auditory verbal agnosia typically retain the ability to hear and process non-speech auditory information, speak, read and write.
Patients with this form of aphasia may present with a contiguity disorder in which they have difficulty combining linguistic elements. For dynamic aphasia, this is most apparent when the patient is asked to sequence at the sentence level whereas for other aphasias contiguity disorder can be seen at the phoneme or word level. [4]