Aphasia is an acquired neurogenic language disorder resulting from an injury to the brain—most typically, the left hemisphere. Aphasia involves varying degrees of impairment in four primary areas:
- Spoken language expression
- Spoken language comprehension
- Written expression
- Reading comprehension
Depending on an individual’s unique set of symptoms, impairments may result in loss of ability to use communication as a tool for life participation.
A person with aphasia often has relatively intact nonlinguistic cognitive skills, such as memory and executive function, although these and other cognitive deficits may co-occur with aphasia.