Expressive aphasia

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}} Expressive aphasia, known as Broca's aphasia in clinical neuropsychology and agrammatic aphasia in cognitive neuropsychology, is an aphasia caused by damage to anterior regions of the brain, including (but not limited to) the left inferior frontal region known as Broca's area (Brodmann area 44 and Brodmann area 45).

Sufferers of this form of aphasia exhibit the common problem of agrammatism. For them, speech is difficult to initiate, nonfluent, labored, and halting. Intonation and stress patterns are deficient. Language is reduced to disjointed words and sentence construction is poor, omitting function words and inflections (bound morphemes). A person with expressive aphasia might say "Son ... University ... Smart ... Boy ... Good ... Good ... "

For example, in the following passage, a Broca's aphasic patient is trying to explain how he came to the hospital for dental surgery:

Yes... ah... Monday... er... Dad and Peter H... (his own name), and Dad.... er... hospital... and ah... Wednesday... Wednesday, nine o'clock... and oh... Thursday... ten o'clock, ah doctors... two... an' doctors... and er... teeth... yah.¹

Comprehension is usually preserved and patients who recover go on to say that they knew what they wanted to say but could not express themselves. Residual deficits will often be seen.

Expressive aphasia is also a classification of non-fluent aphasia, as opposed to fluent aphasia. Diagnosis is done on a case by case basis, as lesions often affect surrounding cortex and deficits are not well conserved between patients.

See also

• Broca's area
• aphasia
• Compare with receptive aphasia (Wernicke's aphasia).

References

1. Goodglass, H. & Geschwind, N. (1976) Language disorders. In E. Carterette and M.P. Friedman (eds.) Handbook of Perception: Language and Speech. Vol II. New York: Academic Press.Template:Psych-stub

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