Impaired language comprehension or expression is called?

• A. Aphasia
• B. Dysarthria
• C. Dysphonia
• D. Circumlocution

Answer: (A)

Aphasia is impairment of language function after brain injury or disease, affecting understanding or producing spoken or written language. It often results from damage to language areas in the dominant hemisphere, leading to difficulties with comprehension (receptive) or expression (expressive), or both. Some people with aphasia understand language well but struggle to speak, others speak fluently but cannot follow or understand, and some have both. The other terms describe different problems: dysarthria is a motor-speech disorder from weakness or discoordination of the muscles used to speak; dysphonia is a voice quality problem arising from the vocal cords; circumlocution is a conversational tactic of describing around a word, not a disorder.