Wernicke's aphasia
| Receptive aphasia | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Broca's area and Wernicke's area | |
| Classification and external resources | |
| Specialty | psychiatry |
| ICD-10 | F80.2 |
| ICD-9-CM | 784.3 |
| MeSH | D001041 |
Receptive aphasia, also known as Wernicke's aphasia, fluent aphasia, or sensory aphasia, is a type of aphasia in which an individual is unable to understand language in its written or spoken form. Even though they can speak using grammar, syntax, rate, and intonation, they typically have difficulty expressing themselves meaningfully through speech. Wernicke's aphasia was named after Carl Wernicke who recognized this condition. People with receptive aphasia are typically unaware of how they are speaking and do not realize their speech may lack meaning. This is due to poor comprehension skills and the inability to understand their own speech because of overall self-monitoring deficits. They typically remain unaware of even their most profound language deficits. When experienced with Broca's aphasia, the patient displays global aphasia.
Like many acquired language disorders, receptive aphasia can be experienced in many different ways and to many different degrees. While the typical case shows severely disturbed language comprehension, many individuals are still able to maintain conversations. Many may only experience difficulties with things such as accents and fast speech with the occasional speech error and can often carry out simple commands. Not all individuals show a complete loss of language comprehension. A common symptom of receptive aphasia is misinterpreting the meaning of words, gestures, pictures. For example, a patient with receptive aphasia may take the expression "it's raining cats and dogs" literally instead of figuratively. What is described here is what is referred to as a "textbook" example with the typical, fully expressed symptoms. Many diagnosed with Wernicke's aphasia have effortless speech and have difficulty with repetition in words and sentences. A person with Wernicke's aphasia may speak over others during conversation, which is "press of speech", and may not be aware that their message does not have a full meaning.
Wernicke's aphasia is characterized as impaired comprehension of incoming speech stimuli (Ropper, Samuels & Klein, 2014). An aphasic patient’s speech output is fluent and has normal prosody. Patients with aphasia will produce an equal number of words in their spontaneous speech output compared to a normal speaker, but their speech contains several paraphasias, circumlocutions, and repetitions (Andreetta & Marini, 2014, p.715). When speaking, a patient will often produce jargon, or nonsense utterances (ASHA, 2016). Patients are unable to appropriately express their thoughts as well as lack the ability to decode meaning within the incoming speech stimuli (Marsel, 2014). The damage is associated with the posterior portion of the left hemisphere of the brain.
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