Broca's aphasia

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General Information on Broca’s aphasia

 

Broca’s aphasia is classified as a non-fluent aphasia.  It also can be known as expressive aphasia, motor aphasia, or anterior aphasia (Brookshire, 2003).  It is caused by damage of Broca’s area (Brodman’s areas 44 and 45) in the posterior-inferior frontal gyrus of the left hemisphere (Roseberry-McKibbin, 2000).  It also extends into the underlying white matter and involves the Insula and Basal Ganglia.

 

Characteristics of Broca’s  aphasia (Roseberry-McKibbin, 2000)

  1. Confluent, effortful. halting, and uneven speech. 
  2. Limited verbal output, short phrases, and short sentences. 
  3. Misarticulated and distorted sounds. 
  4. Agrammatical or telegraphic speech, which is very often limited to nouns and verbs. Omissions of conjunctions, articles, and prepositions are also noted. 
  5. Impaired repetition of words and sentences, especially the grammatical elements of a sentence. 
  6. Impaired naming, especially confrontation naming. 
  7. Better auditory comprehension of spoken language than production.
  8. Difficulty understanding syntactic structures. 
  9. Poor oral reading and poor comprehension of material read. 
  10. Writing problems, which are characterized by slow and laborious writing full of spelling errors and letter omissions. 
  11. Monotonous speech
  12. Apraxia of speech
  13. Dysarthria

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