Aphasia (redirected from auditory aphasia)

aphasia (əfā`zhə), language disturbance caused by a lesion of the brain, making an individual partially or totally impaired in his ability to speak, write, or comprehend the meaning of spoken or written words. It is distinguished from functional disorders such as stammering or stuttering, and from impaired speech due to physical defects in the organs used for speaking. Treatment consists of reeducation; the oral and lip-reading methods employed in the education of deaf and mute children have been found to be of assistance in therapy.

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aphasia

 or dysphasia

Defect in the expression and comprehension of words, caused by damage to the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. It can result from head trauma, tumour, stroke, or infection. Symptoms vary with the brain area involved, and the ability to put words in a meaningful order may be lost. Speech therapy may be useful. In some cases, improvement may be due to assumption of some language functions by other areas of the brain.

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Aphasia

Impairment in the use of spoken or written language caused by injury to the brain which cannot be accounted for by paralysis or incoordination of the articulatory organs, impairment of hearing or vision, impaired level of consciousness, or impaired motivation to communicate. The language zone in the brain includes the portion of the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes surrounding the sylvian fissure and structures deep to these areas. In right-handed persons, with few exceptions, only injury in the left cerebral hemisphere produces aphasia. Lateralization of language function is variable in left-handers, and they are at greater risk for becoming aphasic from a lesion in either hemisphere. See Hemispheric laterality

Distinctive recurring patterns of deficit are associated with particular lesion sites within the language zone. These patterns may entail selective impairment of articulation, ability to retrieve concept names, or syntactic organization. Other dissociations affect principally the auditory comprehension of speech, the repetition of speech, or the recognition of written words. The erroneous production of unintended words in speech (paraphasia), oral reading (paralexia), or writing (paragraphia) is a feature of some forms of aphasia.

Mixed forms of aphasia, caused by multiple lesions or lesions spanning anterior and posterior portions of the speech zone, are quite common, and massive destruction of the entire language area results in a global aphasia. Further, individual variations in behavioral manifestations of similar lesions have set limits on the strict assignment of function to structures within the language area.

Preadolescent children suffering aphasia after unilateral injury usually recover rapidly, presumably by virtue of the capacity of the right cerebral hemisphere early in life to acquire the language functions originally mediated by the left hemisphere. Capacity for recovery of function decreases during later adolescence and young adulthood.

Complete recovery in adults after a severe injury is much less common, and severe aphasia may persist unchanged for the duration of the person's life. Many patients are aided by remedial language training, while others continue severely impaired. See Memory