Discuss Broca's and Wernicke's Aphasia

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The Answer is Based on their studies of brain-damaged patients, 19th-century researchers Paul Broca (1824-1880) and Carl Wernicke (1848-1905) showed that damage to specific areas of the brain causes language problems, called aphasias. When Broca tested patients who had suffered strokes that damaged their frontal lobe, in an area that came to be called Broca's area, he found that their speech was slow and labored and often had jumbled sentence structure. Patients with this problem-slow, labored, ungrammatical speech caused by damage to Broca's area, are diagnosed as having Broca's aphasia. Later research showed that patients with Broca's aphasia not only have difficulty forming complete sentences, they also have difficulty understanding sentences in which word order is critical for understanding the meaning of those sentences, as in "The boy was pushed by the girl,"
The patients studied by Wernicke, who had damage to an area in their temporal lobe that came to be called Wernicke's area, produced speech that was fluent and grammatically correct but tended to be incoherent. Patients such as this not only produce meaningless speech but are unable to understand speech and writing. While patients with Broca's aphasia have trouble understanding sentences in which meaning depends on word order, Wernicke's patients have more widespread difficulties in understanding and would be unable to understand "The apple was eaten by the girl" as well. In the most extreme form of Wernicke's aphasia, the person has a condition called word deafness, in which he or she cannot recognize words, even though the ability to hear pure tones remains intact (Kolb & Whishaw, 2003).

Discuss Broca's and Wernicke's Aphasia

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