Broca's Aphasia

Abstract

There are several people in the world who suffer from some kind of language disorder; for example dyslexia, dysgraphia, or aphasia. The disorder which will be presented in this thesis is called Broca’s aphasia; it got its name after the French neurosurgeon, pathologist and anthropologist Pierre Paul Broca (1824-1880); the doctor who discovered that deficit in speech production – which characterizes this disease – is usually caused by damage to the third frontal convolution of the human brain, now called Broca‟s area (“Broca, Pierre Paul”; Dronkers, Plaisant, Iba-Zizen, and Cabanis 1433). Broca made this discovery by examining the brains of two people (Leborgne and Lelong) who – after suffering some kind of brain damage – were largely limited in their ability to produce speech; because their autopsies revealed that they both had a lesion on the surface of their left frontal lobe, on the basis of which Broca could draw the conclusion that “the integrity of the third frontal convolution (and perhaps of the second) seems indispensable to the exercise of the faculty of articulate language…” (Broca, 1861a in Dronkers, Plaisant, Iba-Zizen, and Cabanis 1433). (Introduction)