Aphasia: Language Disorder
Nowadays,
this world is witnessing the rise of many diseases, there are thousands of
them, some of them can be deadly, some can be harmful to your mental state
and some can even affect your language, this latter is called aphasia ( a language
disorder), aphasia has a lot of types, it has various causes (trauma, brain injury, etc.) and it can
diagnosed slightly, depending on the situation
Aphasia is any disease that can cause language impairment or disorder,
when talking about this kind of disorder, it is basically a field that’s is
called neurolinguistics (neurology + linguistics) and psycholinguistics to some
extent, Neurolinguistics is the study of the relationship between the brain and
language.
Furthermore, our brain, the most complex part of our body, has what is called localization, it means that
every part of the brain has a specific purpose or function, that is to say,
that there are for example some parts that are responsible for your movements
(hippocampus), some parts are responsible for memory, etc.
Moreover, Aphasia has a lot of types the most famous are Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s. When it
comes to localization the parts that are responsible for language are Broca’s
area and Wernicke’s area, they were named after the scientists who discovered
them: Paul Broca and Carl (Karl) Wernicke.
Patients with Broca's aphasia have difficulty in expressing themselves, that's why some are calling it expressive aphasia, the French scientist Paul Broca discovered this in 1861, where he was observing a patient named tan, he was named so because that the only thing he can produce as language ( only the word "tan") with a disability of speaker, he discovered that his brain has some damaged areas, as you can see in the picture below.
A video of a patient with Broca's aphasia :
Patients with Broca's aphasia have difficulty in expressing themselves, that's why some are calling it expressive aphasia, the French scientist Paul Broca discovered this in 1861, where he was observing a patient named tan, he was named so because that the only thing he can produce as language ( only the word "tan") with a disability of speaker, he discovered that his brain has some damaged areas, as you can see in the picture below.
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| Tan's brain after his death, where Broca performed an autopsy on his brain |
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| Paul Broca (1824 - 1880) |
On the other hand, Wernicke's aphasia is a language disorder, it occurs when Wernicke's area is damaged, it affects a human's ability to perceive and understand the language, patients with this kind of aphasia are able to produce sentences and fluently, however, they are incapable of having a sense while producing these sentences.
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| Carl Wernicke ( 1884 - 1905) German Neurologist |
A patient with Wernicke's aphasia ( Fluent) :
The diagnosis of Aphasia is a set of tests and observation, a full recovery from aphasia can not be executed, but a small recovery or healing can put into reality, the patient has to sessions where he/she tries a lot of methods, doctors can ask him to name things, to answer questions and many more.
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