Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Knew what to say but...

I came across the disorder called Broca’s aphasia (or expressive aphasia), and I was struck by this statement on the wikipedia entry:
Patients who recover go on to say that they knew what they wanted to say but could not express themselves.
That's exactly what people who stutter experience. We know exactly what we want to say but cannot pronounce the words fluently; as opposed to express themselves:
Sufferers of this form of aphasia exhibit the common problem of agrammatism. For them, speech is difficult to initiate, non-fluent, labored, and halting. Intonation and stress patterns are deficient. Language is reduced to disjointed words and sentence construction is poor, omitting function words and inflections (bound morphemes). A person with expressive aphasia might say "Son ... University ... Smart ... Boy ... Good ... Good ... "
To summarise, the internal thought processes do not seem to be directly related to speech or grammar: We think somewhere else and our thoughts are coded into grammatically correct sentences, coded into speech motor sequences, and send to our speech muscles. But where do we think? That is a deep puzzle in neuroscience.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What would it be the Wernicke's area function in this process?

Anonymous said...

luiza - I don't quite understand your point.

Broca's aphasia is expressive aphasia (difficulties in expression) caused by damage to the Broca area.

Wernicke's aphasia is receptive aphasia (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receptive_aphasia), primarily evidenced by impairment of comprehension, caused by damage to the Wernicke area, although expressive ability is also sometimes affected.

Anonymous said...

Tommie Dude...

U can not hide B cauz U R an idiot...

+ I M a stutterer...