Classification of aphasic phenomena.

A brief but comprehensive survey of classifying aphasia reveals that most investigators describe at least four major groups, conveniently labelled Broca's, Wernicke's, anomic and global. Conduction and transcortical aphasias are less generally described and modality specific syndromes rarely, if ever, exist purely. The controversy between unifiers and splitters continues but objective numerical taxonomy may solve some of the problems of classification.