Conduction aphasia

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Conduction aphasia, also called associative aphasia, is a relatively rare form of aphasia, caused by damage to the nerve fibres in the arcuate fasciculus, which connects Wernicke's and Broca's areas.

Patients with conduction aphasia show the following characteristics:

• speech is fluent
• comprehension remains good
• oral reading is poor
• repetition is poor
• transpositions of sounds within a word ("television" → "velitision") are common.

To understand the symptoms, recall that Broca's area is associated roughly with expression, Wernicke's area with comprehension.

With both areas intact but the neural connections between them broken, there is the curious condition where the patient can understand what is being said but cannot repeat it (or repeats it incorrectly). This patient will also end up saying something inappropriate or wrong, realize his/her mistake, but continue making further mistakes while trying to correct it.