Broca's aphasia

Broca's aphasia is a language disorder characterized by effortful, nonfluent speech, with comprehension often relatively preserved. It can also impair repetition, naming, reading, and writing.

Inferior frontal gyrus: A frontal-lobe region involved in language, movement, and other cognitive functions. Damage often involves its left-hemisphere portions in classic Broca's aphasia.
Aphasia: An acquired impairment of language caused by damage to the brain. Broca's aphasia is one pattern within this broader family of disorders.
Paul Broca: A French physician and anatomist who linked a left frontal brain injury to impaired speech. His nineteenth-century cases gave the disorder its name.
Wernicke's aphasia: A fluent aphasia often marked by impaired comprehension and speech that may lack meaningful content. It contrasts with Broca's aphasia in fluency and typical comprehension.
Stroke: A brain injury caused by interrupted blood flow or bleeding in the brain. Damage to the left frontal language network after stroke is a common cause.
Arcuate fasciculus: A white-matter pathway connecting frontal and temporal regions of the brain. Its connections help explain why language disorders can involve both production and repetition.
Fluency (speech): The ease, continuity, rate, and rhythm with which speech is produced. Fluency is the feature most visibly reduced in Broca's aphasia.
Tan (patient): The nickname of a patient studied by Paul Broca who could produce little speech beyond a repeated syllable. His severe expressive impairment became a foundational case in the history of aphasia.
Global aphasia: A severe aphasia involving major impairment of both language production and comprehension. Broca's aphasia usually preserves more comprehension and expressive ability.
Neuroimaging: Methods for producing images of the brain's structure or activity. Imaging can locate lesions and reveal that the impairment extends beyond a single cortical area.

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