Joe Auricchio

For COGS101C, I have to know the difference between Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia.

Patients with Wernicke’s speak fluently, but they cannot monitor their own speech for meaning, and so usually end up wandering haphazardly through meanings and associations. It’s open to debate whether or not patients still ideate meanings that they wish to express, but they cannot convey a coherent meaning to a listener. Think stream of consciousness meets free association. “Word salad” is the technical term, I believe. (update: it actually is. I thought that was just the professor being funny.)

Patients with Broca’s, on the other hand, can communicate fine, but have great difficulty producing words; speech is halting, grammatical filler words (”the”, “and”, “that”) get dropped. In extreme cases, patients may only be able to produce a single word, which becomes a sort of placeholder for all other words.

So I just have to remember: Broca’s is the Pokémon disease.

I’m going to hell for that, I know.

This entry was posted Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 1:40 am and is filed under Thinking. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.