Talk:Wernicke's area

acronym reference
brodmann areas can be assumed rather than explicitly defined, especially since they are linked to. however "AF" is neither linked to nor defined. what do people think?

Belizefan (talk) 12:47, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

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It could be useful to add some examples of how someone with this part of their brain damaged might talk and form sentences. 67.189.114.165 03:31, 15 March 2007 (UTC)


 * You might try aphasia. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:17, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

I disagree with characterizing it as having anything to do with syntax. I hypothesize that any jumbled syntax effects there may be in the most severe of cases are mostly attributable to one of two factors: (a) the mental struggle of a person who has lost his ability to understand lexical semantics; (b) deficiency in lexical subselection. For example, a Wernicke's patient might produce the sentence "I'm right now here." This is syntactically fine: [Sentence [DeterminerPhrase[Pronoun]] [VerbPhrase[Verb][AdverbialPhrase[Modifier][Adverb]][PrepositionalPhrase[FusedDeictic]]]]. Syntactically, it's no different from "He runs early in the park" (or "He runs early there" if you wish for a stricter parallel). It sounds weird to us because nobody but Descartes uses the copula without its optional subselection. That's potentially a semantic quibble, not a semantic one, but even if it's not semantic (it really depends on what the patient meant to say), it is the subselection of the copula which specifies that the adjective phrase or adjectival prepositional phrase immediately follow it, and the subselection is part of the lexicon.

"The type of aphasia that results from damage to parts of the left cortex behind the central sulcus is referred to as fluent aphasia (or sensory aphasia). This type of aphasia stands in sharp contrast to nonfluent aphasia. Fluent aphasics have no difficulty producing langauge, but have a great deal of difficulty selecting, organizing, and monitoring their language production. The most important type of fluent aphasia is called Wernicke's aphasia.... In contrast to Broca's aphasics, Wernicke's aphasics are generally unaware of their deficit. Their speech typically sounds very good: there are no long pauses; sentence intonation is normal; function words are used appropriately; WORD ORDER IS USUALLY SYNTACTICALLY CORRECT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"[1] (emphasis added)

[1] O'Grady, Dobrovolsky, Aronoff. _Contemporary Linguistics, Third Edition_. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1997.

I agree. As I understand it, Broca's aphasia will produce syntax errors because it is responsible for translating the speech desired into actual speech. Wernicke's aphasia will produce a meaningless word salad but syntax will be correct. 155.37.215.50 (talk) 13:04, 7 August 2008 (UTC)