Hi,
I am searching for some information on the web or otherwise which would
explain how one go about finding out if a child (who does not speak yet or
even who don't understand language yet) has aphasia.
I am not an expert. When I search with altavista many web pages, I
encountered a lot of confusion about the terms and very unclear
definitions.I wanted first establish what is aphasia and then answer my main
question: how one recognize aphasia in children who do not speak yet.
First off, there is confusion about what is the difference between aphasia
and dysphasia. (Some say dysphasia is a mild form of aphasia, some others, a
severe aphasia, yet others, that the terms are interchangeable.) Then if I
want to focus on children I found out that there are 2 common phrases which
I think I should pursue: "congenital aphasia" and "developmental aphasia",
since small children can both have aphasia from birth (genetically?) or
acquire throughout their (short) life by injury or otherwise (tumors,
infections,etc) (is that right?).
And also, what is the best word which generalized aphasia/dysphasia?:
pathology, disorder, anomaly, dysfunction, disability, inability,
impairment?!
>From what I read I think aphasia is a "wrong wiring in the brain" which is
related to speech/symbolic processing, which includes: input processing
(e.g. hearing), main processing (e.g. extracting meaning), output processing
(e.g. constructing words and sentence thoughts). By "wrong wiring" I mean
that that part of brain is not behaving the same way as in "normal" brain
for whatever reason.
I think that I could generalized it like this. A mental disorder is "some
wrong wiring in a brain". And aphasia is a specific type of mental disorder
which is related to the language processing as described in the previous
paragraph.
And I think I see also that one should distinguish between aphasia and other
speech disorders like dysarthria and apraxia which have to do with
coordination of speech. So they are not directly involved in
symbolic/language processing. Right?
Would somebody help?
jay
