ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some aspects of the neuropsychology of nonverbal communication. Another area where research is only just taking off is the neuropsychology of communication by the facial channel. Such strange, rambling, incoherent, confabulatory speech is a form of jargon aphasia produced by patients sometimes referred to as fluent or Wernicke's aphasies after the 19th-century German neuropsychologist Carl Wernicke. Usually a subset of language skills is impaired. Whereas language and other disorders have traditionally been studied for what they can teach us about the way the brain works, they are now studied for what they can teach us about how communication and language work. In speaking, the semantic deficit means that the patient is limited to words like thing or stuff with very general meanings because the entries in the speech output lexicon for more detailed words, though present, are inaccessible.
