Expressive aphasia, known as Broca's aphasia in clinical neuropsychology and agrammatic aphasia in cognitive neuropsychology, is an aphasia caused by damage to Broca's area in the brain. Clinical neuropsychology is a discipline of psychology that specialises in the clinical assessment and treatment of patients with brain injury or neurocognitive deficits. ... Cognitive neuropsychology is a branch of neuropsychology that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relates to specific psychological processes. ... Aphasia is a loss or impairment of the ability to produce or comprehend language, due to brain damage. ... Brocas area is the section of the human brain (in the opercular and triangular sections of the inferior frontal gyrus of the frontal lobe of the cortex) which is involved in language processing, speech production and comprehension. ... In the anatomy of animals, the brain, or encephalon, is the supervisory center of the nervous system. ...

Sufferers of this form of aphasia exhibit the common problem of agrammatism. For them, speech is difficult to initiate, nonfluent, labored, and halting. Intonation and stress patterns are deficient. Language is reduced to disjointed words and sentence construction is poor, omitting function words and inflections (bound morphemes). A person with expressive aphasia might say "Son ... University ... Smart ... Boy ... Good ... Good ... " One might be looking for the academic discipline of communications. ... Intonation is the variation of tone used when speaking. ... Function words are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. ... This article is about inflection in linguistics. ... Bound morphemes can only occur when attached to root morphemes. ...

Comprehension is usually preserved and patients who recover go on to say that they knew what they wanted to say but could not express themselves. Residual deficits will often be seen. Understanding is a psychological state in relation to an object or person whereby one is able to think about it and use concepts to be able to deal adequately with that object. ...

Expressive Aphasia is also a classification of non-fluent aphasia, as opposed to fluent aphasia. Diagnosis is done on a case by case basis, as lesions often affect surrounding cortex and deficits are not well conserved between patients. A lesion is a non-specific term referring to abnormal tissue in the body. ... The outermost layer of the brain, the cortex is rich in neurons and is the site of most sophisticated neural processing (See also: cerebral cortex). ...

See also

• Compare with receptive aphasia (Wernicke's aphasia).