10 Aphasia Symptoms
Aphasia refers to the inability to formulate or comprehend language due to damage to a certain region of the brain. This damage can be caused by trauma or a cerebral vascular accident (stroke). The diagnosis of aphasia involves the significant impairment in one of four communication modalities after brain injury. It can also occur if there is significant decline over a short duration, also known as progressive aphasia. The four communication modalities are verbal expression, auditory comprehension, functional communication, and reading and writing.
Individuals with aphasia can face many difficulties since they have trouble finding words and are unable to express themselves. They are also unable to read and write. Since their intelligence is unaffected, it can be a very frustrating condition for them. Aphasia has also been observed to affect visual language such as sign language. Aphasia does not refer to damage that has resulted in sensory or motor deficits that produces abnormal speech. Instead, it refers to the damage that affects the individual’s language cognition.
Aphasia is thought to affect about 2 million individuals in the United States with about 180,000 acquiring the disorder annually. In Great Britain, it has been estimated that approximately 250,000 individuals are affected. Despite it being a quite common disorder, about 84.5 percent of individuals have never heard of the condition.
Symptom #1: Anomia
Anomic aphasia refers to a mild and fluent type of aphasia where the affected individual has failure with word retrieval. They have difficulty expressing their words.
This is thought to be a deficit of expressive language. However, affected individuals can usually describe the object in detail accompanied by hand gestures to demonstrate the use of the object without being able to name the object. For example, the patient may ask for “the thing that is used to write” when referring to a pencil or pen.
Symptom #2: Inability to Understand Language
Sentence processing refers to the processing of a language in the context of text (reading) or conversation. There are many studies that have focused on the comprehension process based on single utterances without context.
Research has shown that language comprehension is affected by context preceding an utterance. However, patients with aphasia are unable to understand or comprehend language in the form of text or conversation.
Symptom #3: Inability to Pronounce
Pronunciation is a term that describes the way a language or word is spoken. It usually refers to agreed upon sequences of sounds used in a language or dialect. Due to various factors such as cultural exposure, location of residence, speech or voice disorders, education, social class, or ethnic group, a word can be pronounced in several different ways.
The branch of linguistics that studies these sounds is known as phonetics. In patients with aphasia, they have the inability to pronounce words correctly, which is not due to muscle weakness or paralysis.
Symptom #4: Poor Enunciation
Enunciation or elocution refers to the study of formal speaking in terms of tone, pronunciation, style, and grammar. Some causes of poor enunciation include brain tumor, head trauma, stroke, facial paralysis, loose dentures, alcohol consumption, Lyme disease, and more.
Patients with aphasia can undergo speech therapy to help regain or improve their ability to read, write, understand, and speak. Working with a therapist may help to improve enunciation by increasing the strength and endurance in the muscles used for speech.
Symptom #5: Excessive Neologisms
Neologism is a term that is used to describe a recent or isolated term, phrase, or word that could enter common use but has not been fully accepted into mainstream language. Neologisms are usually directly attributable to the specific person, period, publication, or event.
Neologisms are often created through the combination of existing words and giving these new words new prefixes or suffixes. One good example is the word “brunch” which is a combination of the word breakfast and lunch. Patients with aphasia will have excessive use of neologisms.
Symptom #6: Paraphasia
Paraphasia refers to a type of language where there is output error that is usually associated with aphasia. It is characterized by the production of unintended phrases, syllables, and words while trying to speak.
Paraphasic errors are most commonly seen among patients with fluent aphasia. Paraphasia can be divided into neologistic paraphasia, phonemic paraphasia, perseverative paraphasia, and verbal paraphasia. In patients with aphasia, paraphasia can be seen when affected individuals start to substitute words, letters, and syllables.
Symptom #7: Agrammatism
Agrammatism is a characteristic that is seen among patients with non-fluent aphasia. These individuals usually have speech that contain only content words with very little function words.
Individuals with agrammatism tend to have telegraphic speech where there is a simplified formation of sentences. Agrammatism is often seen in patients with various brain disease syndromes such as traumatic brain injury and expressive aphasia.
Symptom #8: Speech Disorder
Speech disorder refers to a type of communication disorder where the “normal” speech is disrupted. Disruption of normal speech can mean that the affected individual has a lisp or stutters.
Types of speech disorder include cluttering, developmental verbal dyspraxia, muteness, dysarthria, dysprosody, and more. Patients with aphasia often experience some form of speech disorder.
Symptom #9: Dysprosody
Dysprosody is a term describing pseudo-foreign accent syndrome. Prosody refers to variations in accents, melody, intonation, intensity, pauses, and stresses in speech. This means it has many functions such as expressing different levels of speech.
Patients with aphasia and experiencing dysprosody tend to experience issues with pitch or timing control. They are unable to control the way the words are expressed. Experts have observed that their patients who have aphasia may also experience dysprosody. Their accent was altered along with a slower timing of speech.
Symptom #10: Inability to Read and Write
Reading is a process learnt to decode symbols to derive meaning. Reading is a form of language processing where success is measured through comprehension, communication, and sharing ideas or information. Writing is a way for humans to communicate to represent emotion, language, and information using signs and symbols.
In patients with aphasia, both reading and writing skills are lost. This means that the patient is no longer able to comprehend written language or express themselves through writing.
