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.