Broca's Aphasia Essay

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Teal Jenkins
NEUR/ZOO 5100

Dr. Prather

Spring 2014
Broca’s Aphasia
• Background
Aphasia is defined as the inability to communicate and is caused by damage to areas of the brain responsible for language processing [1]. Strokes are the main cause of aphasia, while tumors, blows to the head, and infections can also be the culprits. Aphasia affects the ability to comprehend and produce language, whether written or verbal. Approximately 80,000 people acquire aphasia each year, with men and women being equally affected. About 1 million people in the United States currently suffer from aphasia [9]. Recently, there have been new discoveries in the cognitive processes of language and the treatments for persons afflicted with aphasia.
The link between …show more content…

Upon examining the brains, Broca concluded that the damaged part of the left hemisphere was responsible for speech production. This is now known as Broca’s area. Broca’s aphasia, also known as expressive aphasia or non-fluent aphasia, is diagnosed as the inability to produce speech. Patients with Broca’s aphasia were first thought to have no problems understanding speech, but difficulties when trying to express their thoughts. Recent investigation however, has demonstrated that the physical separation in speech processing between Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas isn’t as concrete as once …show more content…

Researches assessed the ability of patients with lesions involving Broca’s area to discriminate speech sound [7]. Subjects were asked to determine if two syllables in a given stimulus were the same or different. While finding that damage to Broca’s area does not result in substantial speech perception deficits, (as originally thought), the discrimination performance was significantly worse in patients with Broca’s area lesions than controls with lesions in the mesial temporal-occipital

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