Exceptional

Development:
Aphasia and
Dyslexia
Aphasia
 the language impairment that is caused by
brain injury, stroke or primary progressive
aphasia
Loss of ability to use and understand language.
 Can be categorized according to the particular
area of the brain that is damaged into
receptive, expressive and global aphasias.
Receptive aphasia
- also referred to as a sensory aphasia or
“Wernicke’s aphasia”.
- results from a lesion to a region in the upper
back part of the temporal lobe of the brain called
“Wernicke’s area”.
-sufferers of receptive aphasia experience
problems in retrieving words from memory.
Expressive aphasia ( motor aphasia
and “ Broca’s aphasia.”)
- damage to the lower back part of the frontal
lobe interferes with speaking ability, is
characterized by severe impairment in articulation
and speaking disability.
- grammar is not attended to as seen in
sentences that are very short and telegraphic in
structure.
- excessive aphasics however, experience no
difficulty with comprehension.
Global aphasia
- Characterized by the combined symptoms
of expressive and receptive aphasia.
- Global aphasics have limited
comprehension and speech is minimal.
- Type of aphasia is sometimes referred to as
irreversible aphasia syndrome.
Dyslexia
- is defective reading
- it represents a loss of competency due to brain
injury, degeneration and developmental failure to
keep pace with reading instruction.
- IT IS GENETICALLY DETERMINED.
The visual-spatial form of dyslexia
correspond to the following types:
 Dyseidetic
 Agnostic Dyslexia
 Visual-perceptual
 Visual Dyslexia
 Visual-spatial
 Left-hemisphere Strategy Type L and Type S.
The acquired adult dyslexia result from
lesion in the visual association cortex or
the corpus callosum.
There is evidence, however, that the
developmental dyslexia may not be
neuropsychologically distinct from
acquired dyslexia.
For this reason adult acquired dyslexia can
be useful models for those in children,
because the relationships between
CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM function
and structure can be explicated through
known lesions in adults.
Posterior alexia
- Dejerine initially described the syndrome of
posterior alexia in an adult who could write but not
read.
- the patient had no problems with spoken
language or written language and could see written
materials adequately.
Optic alexia
- is seen in adults with occipital lesions where
letters similar in configuration are mistaken from
another.
- accompanied by a gaze disturbance in which
patients easily lost their place in lines and picked
out fragments from different lines.
Verbal alexia
- another form of alexia
- also associated with occipital lesions where
patients could easily recognized letters but could
not grasp whole words.
- words have to be put together letter by
letter.
Dysgnosia
- means ineffiecient reognition.
- term was introduced by Sigmund Freud to
mean loss of the ability to recognized objects.

Agnostic dyslexia
- remains after a more generalized agnosia in
adults with brain lesions.
- patients can read but throw a slow, letter by
letter analysis of a word.
- there is awareness of errors and resulting
frustations.