PSYC 311 Chapter Notes - Chapter 14.2: Receptive Aphasia, Eure, Temporal Lobe
9 Jun 2016
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Comprehension of speech begins with the auditory system. The primary characteristics of wernicke"s aphasia are poor speech comprehension and production of meaningless speech. Speech is fluent and melodic, and appears grammatical. However, patients employ many function words and grammatical clauses, yet very few content words: the word strings they compose actually make no sense. Because of this speech deficit, their ability to comprehend speech must be assessed using non- verbal responses, as we cannot assume they do not understand speech because they cannot produce responses: e. g. a pointing task. People with wernicke"s aphasia often seem unaware of their deficits; they do not seem to recognize their own speech is faulty, nor do they recognize when they cannot understand the speech of others. Because the superior temporal gyrus is a region of the auditory recognition cortex, and because a comprehension deficit is prominent in wernicke"s, it has been characterized as a receptive aphasia.
