What is Conduction Aphasia?

Conduction aphasia is a type of fluent aphasia that may not occur as frequently as other types of aphasia. Conduction aphasia can be mild, moderate, or severe. The hallmark of this aphasia is poor repetition of words/sentences, along with decreased understanding. Like Wernicke’s aphasia, their fluent speech can contain some nonsense words or words with mixed-up sounds, but less frequently. For example, saying “She wasn’t compling over againer, right?”

Conduction aphasia affects the person’s awareness of their speech errors and their ability to correct those errors themselves or by repeating after others. All language skills are affected to different degrees, but disordered speech is the most noticeable to listeners.

Speech: The person speaks in sentences in which the gist is largely understood by the listener, with mild to severe word or sound substitutions. Repeating words and sounds is severely affected. It is NOT apraxia. When speaking, the person may decrease their volume as they get to words that are harder to say so their errors are less obvious.

Writing: Since speaking and writing are both expressive forms of communication, writing issues will be very similar to speech errors. They often do not recognize their errors and may need to copy words.

Reading: Typically poor or at a limited single word/phrase level, limited to largely nouns and verbs.

Understanding: While understanding is affected, social and contextual conversation is usually understood. They will need written and gestured support to help comprehension.

How Can My Aphasia Coach Software Help Anomic Aphasia?

Learners with Conduction aphasia can improve within each language system–reading words and sentences, copying or writing words, repeating words and sentences, understanding spoken and written information, and more!

These exercises are designed to target specific processes that begin at their current skill level, building on existing strengths. To get the fastest results, we recommend that learners with aphasia work independently after they get started.

Where Should I Start My Aphasia Coach?
Take the placement quiz to get recommendations.

You can also try these exercises:

Reading

Writing

Speech

Listening

Numbers

Conduction aphasia can improve, even years after a stroke or brain injury. There is no plateau or 6-month time limit–you can always make progress. The best results occur when you practice My Aphasia Coach for at least 30 minutes a day.