Can you last a day without talking? I can't. I'm a talker. I can talk the whole day if you'd let me.
So what happens when speech is impaired? Its impact on the person and the people around him is profound. An impairment of the process of interpreting and formulating language is symbols caused by brain damage that affects a widely distributed network of cortical and subcortical structures of language-dominant hemisphere is called aphasia (Zhang et al., 2006). It is also one of the most devastating cognitive impairments of stroke, affecting 21-38% of acute stroke individuals.
So what is Wernicke's aphasia? Well, there are different kinds of aphasia. Wernicke's aphasia is just one type. It is characterized by a normal rate of speech. But their speech is all jumbled up. They have difficulties in finding a precise noun and they also have difficulties understanding speech. To be precise, this type of aphasia represents the clinical syndrome that is characterized by impairments in the selection process (paradigmatic axis defect). In this type of aphasia, the lexical repertoire tends to decrease and patients have difficulties understanding language (Ardila, 2010).
Why did I mention this? Well, I'm the kind of person who looks at the 'comments' section of a video or a blog to see what people have to say about a particular video. It helps me notice things that I would never have noticed.
A comment written about the man suffering from Wernicke's aphasia in the video above mentioned:
Despite obvious aphasic properties of his language generation, he does show contextual understanding of the interviewer's questions -- and I think is following better than many would give him credit for (and better than the interviewer I think realised). I find it sad how patronising the interviewer is to an educated man who, in fact, answers quite cogently and humourously if one looks behind the strange constructions.
Q: Where were you a dentist?
A: [points to mouth laughing] Right here.
~♥~
One shouldn't confuse aphasia with dysarthria, which is a deficit in speaking that is caused by weakness and incoordination of speech musculature and other disabilities that is tied to the mechanical aspect of producing speech.
It would interest people to know that a rehabilitation plan to improve language ability for aphasia patients is still a warm spot of research on cerebrovascular disease. In Zhang et al.'s (2006) study, they found out that when blood flow to Wernicke's area is increased, the ability of language improved. This lead the researchers to conclude that hypoperfusion and hypometabolism in the language functional area detected in their study might be the mechanisms of aphasia.
References:
Ardila, A. (2010). Aphasia revisited: A reply to Buckingham, Kertesz, and Marshall. Aphasiology, 24(3), 413-422. doi:10.1080/02687030802553712
Yee, E., Blumstein, S., & Sedivy, J. (2008). Lexical-semantic activation in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia: evidence from eye movements. Journal Of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20(4), 592-612. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
Zhang, Y., Wang, Y., Wang, C., Zhao, X., Gong, X., Sun, X., & ... Wang, Y. (2006). Study on the pathogenic mechanism of Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia. Neurological Research, 28(1), 59-65. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
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