Broca's aphasia

n. Broca's area, named after the French surgeon and anthropologist Pierre Paul Broca(1861), who first described nonfluent speech, secondary to frontal lobe damage, later identified as Broca's aphasia. Also known as Brodmann's area 44, this area is located in the left inferior frontal convolution or gyrus. Though Broca limited his patients' cortical lesion to the left inferior frontal gyrus, technological advances (e.g., computed axial tomography) have shown that while mild Broca's aphasia is confined to Broca's area, more severe cases of this impairment extend beyond Broca's area, including the adjacent premotor and motor regions and underlying white matter. Broca's area is anterior to the section of the precentral gyrus, or primary motor strip, which controls jaw, lip, tongue, and vocal cord movements. Because of this proximity to such important sites of oromo- tor control, lesions in Broca's area tend to result in Broca's aphasia as well as right-sided muscular deficits in the speech areas indicated.

- JGC

► See also APHASIA, BROCA'S