Primary Clinical Skills – Intro to Mental Status Practice Exam

Nonfluent, effortful speech with relatively preserved comprehension is the hallmark of Broca's aphasia. In this pattern, speech is broken and halting, often with agrammatism and missing function words, but understanding spoken language is largely intact. Repetition is typically impaired as well, reflecting the motor speech and grammar production difficulties rather than a loss of comprehension. This contrasts with other patterns: fluent speech with good repetition suggests normal language ability or a different aphasia pattern; fluent but nonsensical speech points to a receptive-language disorder like Wernicke's aphasia; and a global impairment across language modalities indicates global aphasia with widespread damage. So the described observation best fits Broca's aphasia.