Wernicke's aphasia, also known as receptive aphasia, sensory aphasia or posterior aphasia, is a type of aphasia in which individuals have difficulty understanding written and spoken language. Patients with Wernicke's aphasia demonstrate fluent speech, which is characterized by typical speech rate, intact syntactic abilities and effortless speech output. Writing often reflects speech in that it tends to lack content or meaning. In most cases, motor deficits (i.e. hemiparesis) do not occur in individuals with Wernicke's aphasia. Therefore, they may produce a large amount of speech without much meaning. Individuals with Wernicke's aphasia are typically unaware of their errors in speech and do not realize their speech may lack meaning. They typically remain unaware of even their most profound language deficits. Like many acquired language disorders, Wernicke's aphasia can be experienced in many different ways and to many different degrees. Patients diagnosed with Wernicke's aphasia can show severe language comprehension deficits; however, this is dependent on the severity and extent of the lesion. Severity levels may range from being unable to understand even the simplest spoken and/or written information to missing minor details of a conversation. Many diagnosed with Wernicke's aphasia have difficulty with repetition in words and sentences and/or working memory. Wernicke's aphasia was named after German physician Carl Wernicke, who is credited with discovering the area of the brain responsible for language comprehension (Wernicke's area). Signs and symptoms The following are common symptoms seen in patients with Wernicke's aphasia: Impaired comprehension: deficits in understanding (receptive) written and spoken language. This is because Wernicke's area is responsible for assigning meaning to the language that is heard, so if it is damaged, the brain cannot comprehend the information that is being received. Poor word retrieval: ability to retrieve target words is impaired. This is also referred to as anomia. Fluent speech: individuals with Wernicke's aphasia do not have difficulty with producing connected speech that flows. Although the connection of the words may be appropriate, the words they are using may not belong together or make sense (see Production of jargon below). Production of jargon: speech that lacks content, consists of typical intonation, and is structurally intact. Jargon can consist of a string of neologisms, as well as a combination of real words that do not make sense together in context. The jargon may include word salads. Awareness: Individuals with Wernicke's aphasia are often not aware of their incorrect productions, which would