Aphasia
A language disorder caused by brain injury, affecting speaking, comprehension, reading, and writing.
Expressive Aphasia (Broca’s Aphasia)
Non-fluent aphasia characterized by difficulty producing language despite relatively good comprehension.
Receptive Aphasia (Wernicke’s Aphasia)
Fluent aphasia characterized by poor comprehension and fluent but often meaningless speech.
Global Aphasia
Severe impairment in all language modalities — expressive and receptive.
Anomia
Word-finding difficulty; a hallmark symptom of many aphasias.
Paraphasia
Speech errors involving substitution of incorrect sounds or words.
- Phonemic (literal) paraphasia: sound-level errors.
- Semantic paraphasia: word-level errors related in meaning.
Agraphia
Loss or impairment of writing ability due to language disorder.
Alexia
Impairment in reading ability.
Agrammatism
Simplified or telegraphic speech missing grammatical elements like articles and prepositions.
Fluency
Smoothness of speech; varies by aphasia type.
Paralexia
Reading errors involving substitutions or distortions of words.
Neologism
Invented, nonsensical words produced by a person with aphasia.
Circumlocution
Using descriptive phrases to explain a word or concept when the exact word cannot be retrieved.
Prosody
The melody and intonation of speech which may be reduced or altered in aphasia.
Auditory Comprehension
The ability to understand spoken language.
Semantic Memory
Memory for meanings and concepts; can be impaired in aphasia.
Apraxia of Speech
Motor planning difficulty causing inconsistent speech errors despite normal muscle function.
Dysarthria
Weakness or paralysis of speech muscles causing slurred or slow speech.
Conduction Aphasia
Fluent aphasia with good comprehension but poor repetition, often caused by damage to the arcuate fasciculus.
Transcortical Aphasia
Aphasia where repetition is preserved despite impaired speech production or comprehension.
- Transcortical Motor Aphasia: non-fluent with good repetition.
- Transcortical Sensory Aphasia: fluent with good repetition.
Lexical Access
The process of retrieving words from memory.
Phonology
The system of sounds in a language.
Syntax
The rules governing sentence structure and word order.
Morphology
The study of word forms and structure.
Semantic Paraphasia
Substituting a word with another word that has a related meaning (e.g., saying “dog” instead of “cat”).
Literal Paraphasia
Substitution, addition, or rearrangement of speech sounds (e.g., “latipone” instead of “telephone”).
Auditory Verbal Agnosia
Inability to comprehend spoken words despite intact hearing.
Verbal Perseveration
Repetition of a word or phrase beyond appropriate context.
Jargon Aphasia
Fluent but nonsensical speech filled with neologisms and paraphasias.
Alexia without Agraphia
Impairment in reading but intact writing ability, typically from damage to the left occipital lobe and corpus callosum.
Logopenic Aphasia
Type of aphasia characterized by slow speech and frequent word-finding pauses, often with impaired repetition.
Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA)
A neurodegenerative syndrome where language abilities progressively worsen over time.
Semantic Dementia
A type of frontotemporal dementia primarily affecting semantic memory, leading to loss of word meanings.