Broca's aphasia in a stroke victim

The patient is talking about why he came to the hospital -

Yes ... ah ... Monday .... ah .... Dad and Peter Hogan, and Dad .... ah .... hospital .... and ah .... Wednesday .... Wednesday nine o'clock and ah Thursday ... ten o'clock ah doctors ... two .... two .... an doctors and .... ah .... teeth .... yah .... And a doctor an girl .... and gums, an I.

From 'The Shattered Mind' by Howard Gardner.

Wernicke's Aphasia

"What brings you to the hospital? ... "Boy, I'm sweating, I'm awful nervous, you know, once in a while I get caught up, I can't mention the tarrripoi, a month ago, quite a little, I've done a lot well, I impose a lot, while, on the other hand, you know what I mean, I have to run around, look it over, trebbin and all that sort of stuff." ... "Thank you, Mr. Grogan. I want to ask you a few -" "Oh, sure, go ahead, any old think you want. If I could I would. Oh, I'm taking the word the wrong way to say, all of the barbers here whenever they stop you it's going around and around, if you know what I mean, that is tying and tying for repucer, recuperation, well, we were trying the best that we could while another time it was with the beds over there the same thing ..."

From 'The Shattered Mind' by Howard Gardner.

The clearest demonstration of the variable relationship between language structures and brain structures has recently come from studies of acquired agrammatism: the loss of grammatical analytic abilities due to focal brain damage in adults. Though it's long been unclear whether grammatical ability could be linked to specific brain damage, English speakers appear to be especially susceptible to disruption of grammatical abilities as a result of damage to Broca's area. Thus, patients who have significantly impaired speech fluency also tend to show difficulties interpreting sentences that depend entirely on grammatical function words, and particular difficulties interpreting sentences that depend entirely on transformations of word order (like the passive tense in English).

Such problems might suggest that this grammatical function is located in this part of the brain, and many have suggested just this. Curiously, however, a generalized grammatical deficit is not consistently associated with damage to Broca's area, and specifically, in speakers of highly inflected languages where word order is more free and where the passive tense is marked by grammatical words, morphemes or inflections, there appears to be far less agrammatism associated with Broca's area damage.

In these languages (such as Italian), Wernicke's aphasics, who also show disturbances of semantic analysis but not speech fluency, are more impaired in producing and analyzing the corresponding grammatical transformations than are patients with Broca's area damage. So if there is a grammar module, then the parts of this module map in very different ways to different grammatical operations, depending on the relative importance of positional or inflectional tricks for cuing grammatical decisions in different languages. This sort of module is a will-o'-the-wisp.

Deacon, p. 307.