Lidia Kirana Pramasari

180410060168

Psycholinguistics

3. APHASIA

Occasionally, humans suffer damage to particular parts of their brains. The most common

cause of such brain damage is a stroke (also called a cerebrovascular accident). A language

deficit caused by damage to the brain is called aphasia. The study of aphasia is by far the most

important tool in investigation of language in the brain.

There are many varieties of aphasia. C.S. Moss was a psychologist who became aphasic

subsequent to a stroke. The type of aphasia that Moss reports involves a mixture of deficits –

speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Some other forms of aphasia, however, are much more

specific. In these more specific forms, particular skills are lost, and others remain intact.

3.1 Non-fluent Aphasia

Non-fluent aphasia (also called motor aphasia) results from damage to parts o the brain in

front of the central sulcus. Recall that an important part of the frontal lobe is concerned with

motor activity and that the bottom rear portion of the frontal lobe (Broca’s area) is responsible

for the articulation of speech. The most severe form of non-fluent aphasia is global aphasia. In

this type of aphasia, the patient is completely mute.

Utterances produced at this slow rate tend to also lack normal sentence intonation. This is

common characteristic of the speech of Broca’s aphasics and is called dysprosody. It is tempting
to think that the impairment of speech production in Broca’s aphasia is caused by the fact that

Broca’s area is adjacent to the motor strip that controls movement of the facial muscles.

Broca’s aphasia as a syntactic disorder

Broca’s aphasic tend to omit inflectional affixes such as –ing, -ed, and –en in words such

as running, chased and broken. They also show difficulty judging the grammaticality of

sentences. Broca’s aphasics will not always be able to determine which ones are grammatical

and which one are not.

Broca’s aphasia is of a less technical nature but is of great importance to the

understanding of the syndrome as a whole. Unlike patients such as C.S. Moss, Broca’s aphasics

are acutely aware of their language deficit and typically very frustrated by it. This plight of

Broca’s aphasics is consistent with our understanding of the role of the frontal lobe, which is

usually the site of lesion in the syndrome. Broca’s area of the frontal lobe plays an extremely

important role in language.

3.2 Fluent aphasia

The type of aphasia which result from damage to parts of the left cortex behind the

central sulcus is referred to as fluent aphasia (or sensory aphasia). Fluent aphasics have no

difficulty producing language, but have a great deal of difficulty selecting, organizing, and

monitoring their language production.

The most important type of fluent aphasia is called Wernicke’s aphasia. The syndrome is

named after the German physiologist, Carl Wernicke, who in 1874 published a now famous

report kind of aphasia that was almost the complete opposite of Broca’s aphasia. In very severe
cases of this syndrome, phonemes are also randomly selected and the result is speech that has the

intonational characteristics of English but actually contains very real words of the language. This

is termed jargonaphasia.