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Inability to produce and/or understand language that results from damage to portions of the brain that are responsible for language. Depending on which portion is affected, the language disability changes. Damage to the frontal lobe tends to cause a more expressive aphasia (the patient may understand what people say but cannot produce words), while damage to the temporal/parietal, i.e., auditory areas tends to cause more of a receptive aphasia: the patient speaks fluently but makes no sense nor understands other people talking. The damage is always on the dominant side of the brain which, in 95% of people, is the left.
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© 2008 Springer-Verlag GmbH Berlin Heidelberg
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(2008). Aphasia. In: Binder, M.D., Hirokawa, N., Windhorst, U. (eds) Encyclopedia of Neuroscience. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-29678-2_311
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-29678-2_311
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Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-23735-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-29678-2
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