Broca's Aphasia

In Broca's aphasia, also called nonfluent aphasia, speech is labored and telegraphic the minimum number of words is used to convey the message. The speech consists mostly of nouns and verbs, and a sentence is rarely more than three or four long. If you ask a person with this disorder what he or she did today, the answer might be, "Buy bread store." Broca's aphasics show relatively good language comprehension but often have difficulty understanding grammatically complex sentences. They become confused, for example, by sentence constructions in which the agent and object of an action are reversed from the usual word order and the meaning cannot be inferred from the individual word meanings alone. Thus, they easily understand The boy pushed the girl (a simple, active sentence) or The apple was eaten by the boy (which can be understood from the content words, because apples don't eat boys), but The girl was pushed by the boy leaves them unsure as to who pushed whom. The brain damage coinciding with Broca's aphasia usually encompasses a particular portion of the left frontal lobe, referred to as Broca's area.