Fluent aphasia with severely impaired repetition but relatively preserved language comprehension. Speech output is characterized by prominent phonemic paraphasias and word-finding difficulty. Fluent aphasia with severely impaired repetition but relatively preserved language comprehension. Speech output is characterized by prominent phonemic (literal) paraphasias and word-finding difficulty. Patients with conduction aphasia have difficulty reading aloud because they make paraphasic errors, but they may have relatively good comprehension. Conduction aphasia is associated with lesions of the posterior perisylvian language areas.
As a migratory, richer than a static symbolic language disorder, aphasia in its various forms may be marked by relatively more or less anomia, throughout the stages of recovery. For example, neologistic jargon improves to conduction aphasia, but the latter improves to anomia (Brown 1972). Descriptions of naming errors in aphasia must clearly differentiate between the narrower sense of naming on confrontation and the broader sense of word finding in the flow of speech. Geschwind (1967) described failures in confrontation naming which are of theoretical and diagnostic significance.