Chapter s 13 and 14

30

cerebrovascular accident

A "stroke"; brain damage caused by occlusion or rupture of a blood vessel in the brain.

aphasia

Difficulty in producing or comprehending speech not produced by deafness or a simple motor deficit; caused by brain damage.

Broca's aphasia

A form of aphasia characterized by agrammatism, anomia, and extreme difficulty in speech articulation.

function word

A preposition, article, or other word that conveys little of the meaning of a sentence but is important in specifying its grammatical structure.

content word

A noun, verb, adjective, or adverb that conveys meaning.

Broca's area

A region of frontal cortex, located just rostral to the base of the left primary motor cortex, that is necessary for normal speech production.

agrammatism

One of the usual symptoms of Broca's aphasia; a difficulty in comprehending or properly employing grammatical devices, such as verb endings and word order.

anomia

Difficulty in finding (remembering) the appropriate word to describe an object, action, or attribute; one of the symptoms of aphasia.

apraxia of speech

Impairment in the ability to program movements of the tongue, lips, and throat required to produce the proper sequence of speech sounds.

Wernicke's area

A region of auditory association cortex on the left temporal lobe of humans, which is important in the comprehension of words and the production of meaningful speech.

Wernicke's aphasia

A form of aphasia characterized by poor speech comprehension and fluent but meaningless speech.

pure word deafness

The ability to hear, to speak, and (usually) to read and write without being able to comprehend the meaning of speech; caused by damage to Wernicke's area or disruption of auditory input to this region.

transcortical sensory aphasia

A speech disorder in which a person has difficulty comprehending speech and producing meaningful spontaneous speech but can repeat speech; caused by damage to the region of the brain posterior to Wernicke's area.

autotopagnosia

Inability to name body parts or to identify body parts that another person names.

arcuate fasciculus

A bundle of axons that connects Wernicke's area with Broca's area; damage causes conduction aphasia.

conduction aphasia

An aphasia characterized by inability to repeat words that are heard but normal speech and the ability to comprehend the speech of others.

circumlocution

A strategy by which people with anomia find alternative ways to say something when they are unable to think of the most appropriate word.

prosody

The use of changes in intonation and emphasis to convey meaning in speech besides that specified by the particular words; an important means of communication of emotion.

pure alexia

Loss of the ability to read without loss of the ability to write; produced by brain damage.

whole-word reading

Reading by recognizing a word as a whole; "sight reading."

phonetic reading

Reading by decoding the phonetic significance of letter strings; "sound reading."

surface dyslexia

A reading disorder in which a person can read words phonetically but has difficulty reading irregularly spelled words by the whole-word method.

phonological dyslexia

A reading disorder in which a person can read familiar words but has difficulty reading unfamiliar words or pronounceable nonwords.

word-form dyslexia

A disorder in which a person can read a word only after spelling out the individual letters.

spelling dyslexia

An alternative name for word-form dyslexia.

direct dyslexia

A language disorder caused by brain damage in which the person can read words aloud without understanding them.

phonological dysgraphia

A writing disorder in which the person cannot sound out words and write them phonetically.

orthographic dysgraphia

A writing disorder in which the person can spell regularly spelled words but not irregularly spelled ones.

developmental dyslexia

A reading difficulty in a person of normal intelligence and perceptual ability; of genetic origin or caused by prenatal or perinatal factors.

planum temporale

A region of the superior temporal lobe; normally larger in the left hemisphere.