Aphasia, Language and Communications

Aphasia is a disorder of language, but the stroke or accident that causes aphasia may cause other problems with behavior and thinking. When a person has aphasia, life can be difficult and disappointing. Sadness, depression, and anger can make life even more difficult. This article will highlight some of the different ways that aphasia can affect a person's language and communication abilities.

Let's look at several elements of language, and see what happens if those elements are disturbed by aphasia.

Semantics is the part of language that is about word meanings. When we hear a word such as "chair," many things come to mind. We might form a picture of a chair in our mind. We know that we use it for sitting. We know that it's a piece of furniture and that it goes with tables, desks, and so on. We even know more than one meaning for many words. "Chair," for example, might mean something to sit on, or it might refer to the person who is in charge of a committee.

Problems with semantics include:

• Difficulty in understanding what people say.
  
  • It may be like listening to a language that you don't know: you can hear the words but you don't know what they mean.
• Word-finding difficulty (anomia, or dysnomia).
  
  • We all have trouble thinking of a word every now and then, but a person with aphasia has that trouble very often. Many patients say "I know what I want to say, but I just can't get it out!"
    
• Word selection errors (semantic paraphasia)
  
  • For example, you might want to say "my wife," but instead you say "my mother." This can be very embarrassing!

Syntax is the part of language that sets the rules for connecting words and phrases into sentences. These rules help us to express the relationships between words and ideas. For example, syntactic rules help us to understand "who did what to whom" in sentences like

Rules of syntax are complicated. Some of the rules involve word order (which word comes first, which comes next), and some involve the use of "function" words to make connections. Some function words are: "and, with, to, from, between."

Problems with syntax are called "Agrammatism."
Errors include:

• Omission of function words
  
  • "I go store" instead of "I'm going to the store."
    
• Substitution of function words
  
  • "Give .. book .. and Johnny." Instead of "Give the book to Johnny."
    
• Over-reliance on "subject > verb > object" order (in English) to understand relationships