Dr. Zeine's Aphasia Classifications 2012

Front 1

Global aphasia

Back 1

Most severe, all language abilities involved:
oral expression, auditory comp, repetition, naming
Generally involves entire area around Sylvian fissure
Can have 2 lesions – front & back
Production - may say 1-2 words, always the same
Comprehension – maybe 1-2 words
Emotional expressions

Front 2

Lesion location for Broca's Aphasia

Back 2

Lesion usually in left hemisphere, lower portion ofposterior frontal lobe
3rd frontal convolution
Often involves surrounding areas
May include foot of motor strip
Anterior/superior/posterior areas

Front 3

damage to brocas area ONLY causes

Back 3

apraxia of speech

Front 4

characteristics of broca's aphasia

Back 4

Agrammatism
Consequence= telegraphic speech (short utterances)
Oral expression
Mild-to-severe
Speech severely impaired (fluency)

Disappearance of functor words – inflectional endings
Relative preservation of substantive words, compared to functor words
Short nouns likely to remain than verbs
Word order okay, syntax okay

Front 5

theories about why functor words are impaired in people with broca's aphasia

Back 5

They carry rules of grammar, can’t compute rules (debated)
Computational problem
Gets words overall, can’t manipulate word order (passive tense)
Working memory problem
They know what they want to say
Can’t hold info in WM when retrieving (doing something else)
More efficient to drop them! (telegrammore for less)

Front 6

more characteristics of broca's aphasia

Back 6

Expressive speech/ speech production
Speech production effortful, labored
Articulatory problems
Abnormal prosody, sounds like ESL
Especially if Broca’s aphasia is complicated byapraxia of speech
Flat melodic contour (not monotone)  “restricted pitch changes”


Anomia: naming problems
Word retrieval (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs…)
Does not refer to functor words
Agrammatism - syntactic issue
Specific word omissions: articles, plurals, prepositions
Reduced MLU (average # of words)

Front 7

auditory comprehension in broca's aphasia

Back 7

Better than anything they are doing
Mod-mild compared to oral expression
Might not be able to retrieve a word, but can understand it
Restricted to certain sentence types
Require syntactic analysis – passive tense
Asyntactic comprehension problems because of the analysis they must do
Some evidence that it mirrors their oral expressive speech

Front 8

repetition with brocas aphasia

Back 8

Mild-to-severe
Can repeat single words
Longer utterances will reflect agrammatism
Can usually respond to phonemic cues
Lexical/semantic connection still present
Errors made usually in the “ball park”  “pen-pencil”
Functor word testing “no ifs, ands, or buts” – can’t do!

Front 9

writting with broca's aphasia

Back 9

Mild-to-severe
Will reflect oral expressive abilities
No functor words
Word order okay
Word retrieval better with nouns than verbs
Don’t confused writing linguistic issues with hemiplegia!!

Front 10

other dysfunctions with broca's aphaisa

Back 10

Right hemiplegia
Oral motor difficulties
Blowing, moving tongue (apraxia, programming)
Depression – awareness, but also changed brain chemistry
Catastrophic emotional reactions (crying, violence)

Front 11

damage with mixed transcortical aka isolation aphasia

Back 11

 “Cookie cutter” – isolated – perisylvian region ok
 Rare – lesion isolates the speech area from other cortical areas
 Could be in either place:
 Frontal lobe – inferior
 Temporal lobe - superior, anterior

Front 12

isolation aphasia

Back 12

 WAB – only place it is referred to as a classification
 Fluency, auditory comprehension, naming  severe reduction
 Repetition is not as bad…mild to moderate impairment
 Does not initiate conversation (Brocas will initiate)

Front 13

lesions and damage with transcoritcal motor aphasia

Back 13

 aka anterior isolation aphasia
 Loci of lesion – 3 possible areas:
 Superior to/deep in/anterior to Broca’s area
 Broca’s area is not damaged

Front 14

transcortical motor aphasia

Back 14

Spontaneous speech  **worse than anything else**
Severely impaired; looks like Broca’s, but less
articulatory problems
More perseveration; gives correct initial response, but
all subsequent are same response (bottlebottle…keybottle)
Phonemic paraphasia errors
Non-fluent
-Lexical, syntactic errors

Auditory comprehension
Better than production
As good as, or better than Brocas (mild-to-moderate
impairment, contradicts Brocas)

Repetition
Can repeat properly, better than expected (better than Broca)
Sometimes sounds echolalic (Broca not echolalic
Arcuate Fasiculus okay
Naming (word retrieval)
Better than production