APHASIA

APHASIA is a disturbance of the comprehension and formulation of language caused by dysfunction in specific brain regions. It results from a breakdown of the two-way translation that establishes a correspondence between thoughts and language. Patients with aphasia can no longer accurately convert the sequences of nonverbal mental representations that constitute thought into the symbols and grammatical organization that constitute language. One might say that the images or representations in thought can no longer be rendered in the words and sentences that appropriately translate them. The opposite process, the generation of internal imagery to match a sentence that is heard. . . © 1992, Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved.