What is Wernicke's Aphasia?

"You know that smoodle pinkered and that I want to get him round and take care of him like you want before." The sentence that you just read, you might have not understood what this person was trying to say and think that they might have had too many drinks during happy hour.  What if I told you that the person trying to communicate was someone with Wernicke’s aphasia. Now what is Wernicke’s’ aphasia? Well people that have this aphasia may speak in long sentences that have no meaning, add unnecessary words, even create made-up words, and have impaired ability to remember the names of objects like in the example in the first sentence. The person can still talk smoothly but their comprehension and expressive language tend to be equally impaired. Although this might be a really old video, this is a good example of a person with Wernicke’s aphasia. The man is trying to communicate and does not know that what he is trying to say does not make sense. Usually people with this aphasia tend to have anosognosia (lack of awareness) of their communication problems.

 

How does this happen though? It is caused by damage in the posterior portion of the left temporal lobe knows are the Wernicke’s area, which is located near the auditory cortex. The Wernicke’s area is associated with the processing of words that we hear being spoken, or language input. In this following link, it explains the process of the Wernicke’s area and what its function is. It describes that when you hear the word first it goes to your auditory cortex and then sends it to the Wernicke’s area, which then associates it with a representation of a word that enable us to retrieve the meaning of the particular word. And when a person tries to say the word that they just have read, it goes first to the primary visual cortex, then transmitted to the Wernicke’s area. In both the auditory and visual method after going to the Wernicke’s area it travels to the Broca’s area, and then to the primary motor cortex. In case I got you confused I would say just go to this link and scroll down to the heading that says Models of Spoken and Written Language Functions in the Brain. The explanation from this site is much better than my version.