aphasia, Broca's

n. Expressive impairment secondary to brain damage, typically in the left inferior frontal gyrus or convolution (Broca's area or Brodmann's area 44) and, in more severe cases, extending to the adjacent premotor and motor regions and underlying white matter. Symptoms may include a combination of various deficits, such as nonfluent, agrammatic oral expression; apraxia of speech (difficulty sequencing the sounds in a word); dysarthria (abnormal strength in speech musculature); poor repetition of words and phrases; and limited naming abilities (e.g., anomia and semantic paraphasias). Auditory comprehension is relatively spared, functional for everyday conversation but deficient for complex sentences (e.g., passive sentences: The apple was eaten by the girl). Writing errors may resemble oral production deficits. Reading comprehension may parallel auditory comprehension skills. Broca's aphasia may be confused with transcortical motor aphasia, as both patient groups exhibit similar symptoms. Yet, unlike in Broca's aphasia, word/phrase repetition is not impaired in transcortical motor aphasia.  - JGC