The main claim of this paper is to explain how
brain
damage affects a person’s communication skill.
The authors begin this
article by giving an example of a man in an auto
accident. This man recovered from his
physical injuries but was not able to overcome
aphasia, which is the
speech and
writing difficulties that persisted after the swelling in his brain died
down. It goes on to tell how this man was
always at a loss for words, and his speech was slow and deliberate. He could no longer write things in the same
amount of time as before, and his social life was coming to a halt.
The
second section of the article deals with aphasia. Aphasia is the difficulty of expressing thoughts and understanding
spoken or written words. It is a result
of damage to the left side of the brain that controls a person’s language. The main causes are strokes or accidents,
and more than one million Americans suffer from aphasia. Some more severe forms of aphasia can cause
people to draw blanks when reading or doing simple arithmetic as well as
feeling as thought they are in a foreign country. However the most common effect is that the person cannot think of
the right names for objects and also omitting important parts of speech such as
conjunctions, adjectives, and adverbs.
Language can also become slurred and words mispronounced.
Finally
the article continues to say that younger people have a better chance of
recovering language skills because they have more healthy brain tissue than
adults. They also claim that speech
therapy and counseling can provide great benefits for aphasia sufferers. Therapists can help families cope and find
new occupations for victims that rely less on language.
Traumatic Brain
Injury: Cognitive
and Communication Disorders
The
main point in this article is showing the cognitive and communicative
problems that go along with traumatic brain injury.
It begins by describing what traumatic brain injury is, sudden physical
damage to the brain, and that the major cause is motor vehicle accidents. Males between the ages 15 and 24 are the
most susceptible because of their high-risk lifestyles. Also susceptible are individuals over 75
years of age, and approximately 200,000 Americans die from traumatic brain
injury.
The
article then contends that the results of brain injury vary from person to
person depending on an individual’s personality, pre-injury abilities, and the
severity of the damage. New injuries to
the brain can cause temporary damage from the swelling of the brain. Most of this damage heals once the brain
reduces swelling, so it is hard to determine how much long-term damage there
will be. Damage to a specific point or
area can lead to permanent problems.
However younger individuals may be able to heal faster than adults with
the same injury because other areas of younger children can learn to take over
the function of the injured areas.
Language
problems include such things as difficulty in finding words, poor sentence
formation, or faulty descriptions and explanations. Many individuals will have problems understanding multiple
meanings such as in jokes, sarcasm, or figurative expressions. Many times the injured individual will not
realize their errors and often blame them on the person they are speaking
to. Reading and writing abilities can
be even worse than speaking and understanding.
Also simple mathematical abilities are often affected.
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