syntactic aphasia

n. One of the four subtypes of aphasia proposed by Henry Head, who suggested a fourfold classification of aphasia into verbal, syntactic, nominal, and semantic. Syntactic aphasia in general corresponds to what is usually referred as Broca's aphasia. Patients with this type of language defect have difficulties in using the morphosyntactic rules of the language and apraxia of speech. It is usually associated with damage in the left posterior frontal lobe, the brain area named Broca's area(Brodmann's area 44). – AA