ABSTRACT
As early as in 1868, Hughlings Jackson described a dichotomy in the spontaneous expression of his aphasic patients. He divided these into two 'classes'. One class was 'speechless or nearly so', the other one had 'plenty of words but mistakes in words'. A few years later, Wernicke (1874) distinguished two distinct behaviours in the speech production of aphasic patients, that he termed fluent and nonfluent. He noted that comprehension was frequently impaired in the fluent aphasics, whereas many nonfluent patients appeared to have good comprehension. This observation, again, induced him to introduce the wellknown dichotomy, i.e. motor and sensory aphasia.
