LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION AND PRODUCTION DISORDERS IN APHASIA: A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE

Aphasia, a language disorder resulting from brain damage, significantly impacts both language production and comprehension. This paper reviews the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying aphasia, with a focus on expressive and receptive language deficits across different subtypes. In Broca's aphasia, individuals exhibit non-fluent, grammatically impaired speech, while Wernicke's aphasia is characterized by fluent but semantically meaningless speech. Conduction aphasia, a selective production deficit, highlights the role of the arcuate fasciculus in speech. The review also explores comprehension deficits, particularly in syntactic parsing, as seen in Broca’s aphasia. Recent neuroanatomical research has moved beyond the traditional Broca-Wernicke model, demonstrating the involvement of a broader network, including cortical and subcortical regions, in language processing. Assessment tools such as the Western Aphasia Battery-Revised (WAB-R) and the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE) provide valuable insights into aphasia diagnosis and profile. The paper concludes by discussing modern therapeutic approaches like Constraint-Induced Language Therapy (CILT), Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT), and Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA), which target specific cognitive-linguistic impairments. This review contributes to the understanding of aphasia as a complex, multifaceted disorder, emphasizing its diagnosis, neural bases, and treatment strategies.