What is Aphasia?

The term aphasia (sometimes "dysphasia") is used to refer to an acquired (as opposed to developmental) disorder of language that results from damage to the brain. It is typically caused by stroke, tumor, or other brain injury. About two thirds of people with a left hemisphere stroke experience some form of language impairment. Some patients with aphasia produce sentences of normal length and prosody; we characterize their output as being fluent. Other patients with aphasia produce pieces of sentences, the output is short and choppy, phrase length is reduced to one or two words, and speech is halting, with many pauses. The speech of these patients is defined as being nonfluent. The language impairment that is common to all aphasic patients--at least at some point during the course of their aphasia--is an abnormal difficulty retrieving words. For more information about the subtypes of aphasia, visit the NAA.

Anomia, Alexia, and Primary Progressive Aphasia are different types of Aphasia.