Broca’s faculté du langage articulé: Language or Praxis?

Abstract

De Oliveira-Souza, Moll, and Tovar-Moll (this issue) historically reevaluate that Paul Broca’s aphemia should be considered as a kind of apraxia rather than aphasia. I argue that such a claim is unwarranted, given the interpretation of the faculty of speech Broca derived from his predecessors, Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud and Franz Joseph Gall, and also with a view on the then generally held opinion that the terms aphémie and aphasie were synonyms. I will discuss evidence that patients such as Leborgne, producing only very few words or syllables, suffer from a global aphasia, affecting all modalities, despite Broca’s statement that Leborgne’s comprehension was intact. I also point to Broca’s claim that the faculty of speech, located in the left anterior hemisphere, is independent from hand preference because it is an intellectual and not a motor function, and to his statement that the cerebral convolutions are not motor organs. I finally contend that, in order to determine whether a given language problem should be labeled as aphasia or apraxia, it is crucial to first be clear on the components of old and new models of language production.

Keywords:

• Paul Broca
• Franz Joseph Gall
• Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud
• aphasia
• aphemia
• apraxia of speech

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Marjorie Lorch for her very helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this article and Hugh Buckingham for helpful discussions on the complex history of the notion of apraxia of speech. I am also grateful to Daniel Sheppard for correcting my English.