Aphasia is a language disorder that occurs following brain damage following a stroke or brain injury causing difficulties with:

• Spoken language expression

  • Not being able to find the word​

  • Saying the wrong word

  • Switching sounds

  • Saying non-words

  • Difficulty with forming sentences

• Written expression

• Spoken language comprehension

  • Difficulty understanding what others are saying​

  • Difficulty in noisy environments

• Reading comprehension

• Numbers or calculations

Aphasia can be fluent or non fluent. 

 

Apraxia

A motor speech disorder that may affect the ability to produce the intended sounds. Signs include:

• Trouble repeating sounds

• Difficulty producing new sounds

• Inconsistent errors- saying something right once then swapping sounds

• Groping- difficulty getting your lips and tongue to move to produce a sound

• Slow rate of speech

• Automatic speech is intact (e.g., "hello," "how are you?")​

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​Primary Progressive Aphasia

Aphasia may also result from neurodegenerative disease. Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a subtype of fronto-temporal dementia in which language capabilities become progressively impaired.​​ PPA is deterioration of language for at least two years before decline in other cognitive functions. There are three main variants: 

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• Nonfluent/agrammatic variant is characterized by effortful, halting speech with inconsistent sound errors or apraxia of speech and or difficulty in producing complete grammatical sentences.

• Semantic variant experiences impaired naming of objects more than actions and impaired single word comprehension. 

• Logopenic variant has impaired word retrieval (anomia) in both conversation and naming task, impaired working memory, speech sound substitution errors in conversation and naming tasks, spared single word comprehension and object knowledge, and absence of difficulty producing grammatical sentences. 

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