Receptive aphasia

Receptive aphasia
Other names	Wernicke's aphasia, fluent aphasia, sensory aphasia
Broca's area and Wernicke's area
Specialty	Neurology

Wernicke's aphasia, also known as receptive aphasia,^[1] sensory aphasia, fluent aphasia, or posterior aphasia, is a type of aphasia in which individuals have difficulty understanding written and spoken language.^[2] Patients with Wernicke's aphasia demonstrate fluent speech, which is characterized by typical speech rate, intact syntactic abilities and effortless speech output.^[3] Writing often reflects speech in that it tends to lack content or meaning. In most cases, motor deficits (i.e. hemiparesis) do not occur in individuals with Wernicke's aphasia.^[4] Therefore, they may produce a large amount of speech without much meaning. Individuals with Wernicke's aphasia often suffer of anosognosia – they are unaware of their errors in speech and do not realize their speech may lack meaning.^[5] They typically remain unaware of even their most profound language deficits.

Like many acquired language disorders, Wernicke's aphasia can be experienced in many different ways and to many different degrees. Patients diagnosed with Wernicke's aphasia can show severe language comprehension deficits; however, this is dependent on the severity and extent of the lesion.^[2] Severity levels may range from being unable to understand even the simplest spoken and/or written information to missing minor details of a conversation.^[2] Many diagnosed with Wernicke's aphasia have difficulty with repetition in words and sentences and/or working memory.^[5]

Wernicke's aphasia was named after German physician Carl Wernicke, who is credited with discovering the area of the brain responsible for language comprehension (Wernicke's area) and discovery of the condition which results from a lesion to this brain area (Wernicke's Aphasia).^[6] Although Wernicke's area (left posterior superior temporal cortex) is known as the language comprehension area of the brain, defining the exact region of the brain is a more complicated issue. A 2016 study aimed to determine the reliability of current brain models of the language center of the brain. After asking a group of neuroscientists what portion of the brain they consider to be Wernicke's Area, results suggested that the classic "Wernicke-Lichtheim-Geschwind" model is no longer adequate for defining the language areas of the brain. This is because this model was created using an old understanding of human brain anatomy and does not take into consideration the cortical and subcortical structures responsible for language or the connectivity of brain areas necessary for production and comprehension of language. It is important to understand that while there is not a well defined area of the brain for language comprehension, Wernicke's Aphasia is a known condition causing difficulty with understanding language.^[7]