Select the appropriate answer choices about the types of aphasia, and match them to the correct category.
There are many possible types of speech disorders, and aphasia is the generic term used to refer to speech disorders as a whole. Though aphasia literally means "without speech," it often is used in reference to the disorder suffered by people whose speech is problematic.
Two of the many possible types of aphasia are the broad and contrasting categories of agrammatism and fluent aphasia. Agrammatism is the technical term for one type of aphasic condition in which people have difficulty stringing words together into sentences; this type of speech is called agrammatism because it is apparently speech without grammar. Someone suffering from agrammatism might, for example, respond to a question about weekend plans by saying, "Saturday, er,…uh, flight…no, uh…Sunday…leave…uh…airport." It is important to note that someone with this condition can generally understand what others say quite well but has difficulty responding in a fluent and grammatical way. Fluent aphasia is a very different type of aphasic condition. As the name indicates, a person who suffers from fluent aphasia can speak quite fluently but tends not to understand what others are saying and tends not to make much sense when speaking. A fluent aphasic may make up words or string words and phrases together in meaningless gibberish, as in "I focalized, you deny it, after all, I expect happenings, however, not at all important, on my hemmer."
The study of aphasia—aphasiology—has increasingly been conducted from the point of view of neurolinguistics, which incorporates knowledge of the brain and its interrelation with language. A question that has long been debated in the field of neurolinguistics is whether a particular type of language disorder can be correlated with damage to a particular area of the brain. The debate started in the nineteenth century when French surgeon Paul Broca indicated an area in the brain in front of and slightly above the left ear as the area of the brain responsible for certain types of speech problems. He based this conclusion on postmortems that he had conducted on patients who had difficulty producing speech. Today, it is known that damage to this general region of the brain is likely to result in severe speech problems; as a result, agrammatic speech is sometimes known as Broca's aphasia. In the years that followed, German neurologist Karl Wernicke noted that a number of patients who suffered from fluent aphasia had severe brain damage toward the back of the brain, in an area under the left ear. This area of the brain became known as Wernicke's area; today fluent aphasia is sometimes called Wernicke's aphasia.
However, it is not always the case that brain damage to a particular spot in the brain automatically results in a particular speech disorder. There is a statistically higher chance of suffering from agrammatic speech as a result of brain damage to the area noted by Broca, and there is a statistically higher chance of suffering from fluent aphasia as a result of damage to the area of the brain noted by Wernicke, but there are also numerous counterexamples of patients with damage to those areas of the brain whose language function is intact and patients without damage to those areas of the brain who suffer from either agrammatism or fluent aphasia.
