Wernicke's Aphasia Research Paper

Aphasia is an acquired language disorder caused by damage in one or more parts of the brain, resulting in deficits in expressive and receptive language and can affect other language-based skills. Damage to the brain that results in aphasia can be caused by several events or neurological conditions, but the most common cause of aphasia is a cerebrovascular accident, or a stroke. People of all ages can acquire aphasia, but the most common sufferers are middle-aged to elderly individuals who have suffered a stroke, particularly occurring on the left side of the brain. Strokes occurring in the left side of the brain are so destructive because that is where language functions are housed in most individuals. There are several classifications of …show more content…
As the name suggests, Wernicke’s aphasia is caused by damage to Wernicke’s area, located near the back of the temporal lobe on the left side of the brain. Being a fluent aphasia, individuals with Wernicke’s aphasia have fluent and connected speech but may have some difficulty with word retrieval. Severely impaired auditory comprehension is the defining symptom of Wernicke’s aphasia, so this should be examined in order to differentiate it from other aphasias and the improvement of which should typically be the foremost target in therapy. Reading comprehension is also affected, as well as naming skills. Therapy with individuals with Wernicke’s aphasia can be difficult because they tend to not be aware of their errors, but some studies have shown that therapy is indeed …show more content…
Another notable fluent aphasia is transcortical sensory. This form of the disorder occurs after damage to the area joining the temporal and parietal lobes and is very similar to Wernicke’s aphasia in its effects on the sufferer’s language. Whereas Wernicke’s aphasia causes significant repetition deficits, in transcortical sensory aphasia repetition is intact and even remarkable. Those with transcortical sensory aphasia are very fluent in their speech, but sentences are typically unrelated and speech is circumlocutory and stereotypic. Echolalic speech is present and reading and auditory comprehension are poor as in Wernicke’s aphasia. Despite having little to no awareness of their speech errors, those with transcortical sensory aphasia typically have a good