Wernicke Aphasia

Aphasia is typically caused by an injury to the left hemisphere of the brain, resulting in the impairment of speech and language skills including fluency, repetition, naming and comprehension (Dronkers & Baldo, 2010). Wernicke’s area is part of the association cortex, located in the posterior of the temporal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere of the brain (Bernstein et al., 2013). Additionally, the function of Wernicke’s area has been shown to be involved in the comprehension of speech in both written and spoken forms (Bernstein et al., 2013). Consequently, damage to Wernicke’s area disrupts the comprehension process of language, resulting in what is known as Wernicke’s aphasia, named from neurologist Carl Wernicke who first discovered this
connection (National Aphasia Association, n.d.).
People who suffer from Wernicke’s aphasia are generally characterised by the inability to understand the meaning of words and while speaking fluently, sentences will be nonsensical and often contain irrelevant or non-existent words (National Aphasia Association, n.d.). One example of this comes from a study in which a person with Wernicke’s aphasia was asked to explain the function of a cigarette, replying with ‘This is a segment of a pegment. Soap a cigarette’ (Lapointe, 1990, as cited in Bernstein et al. 2013). Consequently, this disability is both fascinating and saddening, necessitating further thought and research.