Gramer Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

Today I read the sad news from the actor Bruce Willis' family saying he's giving up acting

because he's been diagnosed with aphasia, which is a brain disorder that affects people's

ability to make, and sometimes process language. So I immediately went to an episode we did

back in 2016 about aphasia to refresh my memory about what it is and how it works. I barely

remembered any of it and found it fascinating, so I thought you'd enjoy it again too.

And although this falls under the other cool stuff part of the podcast, I want to add that

it's not cool for Bruce Willis' family. My dad who raised me suffered a brain injury when I was

in my 20s and I've been fascinated with the brain ever since. He had all sorts of weird, hard-to-understand

problems. Like he could remember how to operate the washer, but not the dryer. So although we're

talking about aphasia today and all the elements that make it interesting from a language perspective,

my heart also goes out to Bruce and his family and all the other people who have aphasia.

It's a hard thing to go through or to watch a loved one go through and I just wanted to acknowledge

that up front.

Language impairment is often caused by tragic conditions like aphasia, a type of brain damage.

This condition can teach us a lot about how language works. To begin to understand such a complex,

fascinating and ever-changing field will first talk about the human brain and the field devoted

to its study. Neural linguistics is a branch of neuroscience whose goal is to understand the

neural aspects of language, such as how the brain processes language. To do research in neural

linguistics, neuroscientists depend largely on impaired language data, not normal language data.

In other words, analyzing the patterns in the abnormal speech of someone who suffered an

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