Aphasia Assessment
What are the variables for assigning Aphasia type?
1. Naming (Anomia)
2. Fluency
3. Auditory comprehension
4. Repetition
How can fluency be determined in assessment?
By asking open-ended questions
What is the opposite of slow-rise time?
Noise buildup (patient responds to initial portion of message but fails to comprehend later portions)
Information capacity deficit
Occurs when individual cannot receive and process information at the same time
What is present in all Aphasia types?
Anomia
What are characteristics of fluent aphasia?
Easy articulation, good syntactic structure
What does recovery factors include?
Lesion location, cause, age, gender, handedness, education level, presence of other cognitive or nonlinguisitic deficits, and premorbid personality/psychosocial factors
What does repetition require?
Hearing the word correctly, holding it in short-term memory, planning the speech sounds, producing them correctly
What is important to assess in Aphasia?
All modalities (Reading, writing, verbal expression, auditory comprehension)
What are characteristics of non-fluent aphasia?
Slow, labored speech with short utterance length (choppy and awkwardly worded)
What type of aphasia has a less recovery than any other types?
Global aphasia
T or F: Thalamic aphasia is very rare and often underdiagnosed
True
What characteristics are important to assess in Aphasia?
Fluency, naming, repetition, and auditory comprehension
What errors are common in fluent aphasia?
Word finding & semantic/phonemic errors
What are the four common patterns?
Wernicke’s aphasia > Conduction > mild anomia
Global aphasia > mixed nonfluent aphasia > severe Broca’s aphasia
Global aphasia > mixed nonfluent aphasia
Broca’s aphasia > mild Broca’s aphasia
Characteristics of thalamic aphasia
Fluent speech with word-finding difficulty, semantic paraphasias, repetition is usually intact
What is anomia?
Involves confrontation naming of objects, actions, colors, body parts, and free recall of category members (a.k.a generative naming - animals)
What is slow-rise time in aphasia?
Pt. misses the initial portion of the spoken message
What is a retention deficit?
Length increases = patient's auditory comprehension performance declines
(pt. can follow 1-step commands but not 2)
T or F: Most agree that patients plateau at 6 months - 1 year
True