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The language disorder called aphasia usually affects both the understanding and production of spoken and written language. However, it does not affect intelligence. The types of neurological disorders that cause aphasia are usually ones that occur suddenly, such as stroke or head injury, where some degree of recovery is usual. However, the precise location of the brain damage that has occurred and the size of the damaged area will both influence the type and severity of the aphasia. Although each individual will be affected differently there are a number of broad types of aphasia.

Fluent aphasia
In fluent aphasia language is spoken at a relatively normal rate, articulation is effortless, intonation normal and some degree of sentence structure is often seen, but the words themselves often do not make sense. Taken to its extreme the person may not produce any recognisable words at all and simply produce strings of nonsense words. This is known as ‘jargon aphasia’.

e.g. ‘be daydums de day dums gemansem de payum’

Sometimes jargon may be produced within an apparently normal sentence structure, making what is said sound like a normal but unknown language.

e.g. ‘the spleefering are nefererling the bedayduns in the fenitinring.’

A form of fluent aphasia in which language is still rather meaningless but appears more understandable is often referred to as Wernicke’s aphasia.

e.g. ‘it was all in the, what’you call it the, beffering, you know in the one up the snocth.’

These types of fluent aphasia are also often linked with a marked difficulty in understanding spoken language and in reading and writing. As a result, fluent aphasia is sometimes referred to as receptive aphasia.

Often, people who originally have severe jargon aphasia recover into milder forms of fluent aphasia.

Non-fluent aphasia
In contrast to fluent aphasia, where speech may sound normal while making little or no sense, in non-fluent aphasia speech may be slow, laborious and halting, and language is often lacking in any grammatical structure, making it sound a bit like a telegram. Fewer words are produced but they are usually the key, meaningful words. This has been traditionally known as Broca’s aphasia.

e.g. ‘me...mother,no.....buver..no.....me,...boy.........live.... America, yeah'

Usually, people with non-fluent aphasia are able to understand more language than they are able to produce and so this type of aphasia is often referred to as expressive aphasia.

It can be the case in very severe aphasia that both understanding and expression are very impaired. This is sometimes known as global aphasia.