ABSTRACT
Language disorder (also known as ‘fluent’ or ‘sensory aphasia’) named after the German psychiatrist Carl Wernicke (1858-1905). Unlike other acquired language disorders, Wernicke’s aphasia is associated with a great degree of fluency and unimpaired prosody. Other typical characteristics are: (a) frequent omissions, permutations, or additions of sounds (so-called ‘phonemic paraphasia’) ( jargon); (b) choice of semantically related words of the same syntagmatic category as the target word (so-called ‘semantic paraphasia’) ( neologism); (c) morphological errors; (d) problems with selection restrictions; and (e) in some languages, contamination of syntactic constructions ( paragrammatism). Comprehension of words and sentences is often severely impaired, though reading and writing may be less so.
