Description of Wernicke's area
Descripción del área de Wernicke
- Date
- 1874 · confidence high
- Place
- Breslau, Prussia (present-day Wrocław, Poland)
- Credited to
- Carl Wernicke
- Field
- Life & health
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
Wernicke described a region of the temporal lobe whose damage causes receptive aphasia: patients speak fluently but incoherently and fail to understand language, unlike the motor aphasia linked to Broca's area.
The classic two-area model has been revised: language comprehension and production depend on a distributed network of brain regions, not such a clear-cut division between Wernicke's and Broca's areas.
What it led to
- Classic Wernicke-Lichtheim model of language localisation
- Clinical classification of aphasias
- Modern neurolinguistics based on distributed brain networks