title: 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.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychology , Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour , Nijmegen , the Netherlands.
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Eling
mesh_terms: D001039:Aphasia, Broca / Q000145:classification / Q000266:history*; D001072:Apraxias / Q000145:classification / Q000266:history*; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D009462:Neurology / Q000266:history; D013060:Speech
keywords: Franz Joseph Gall; Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud; Paul Broca; aphasia; aphemia; apraxia of speech