English Words

11.4.2
Wernicke’s aphasia
As you can see in the figure on p. 250 WERNICKE’S APHASIA (also called RECEPTIVE APHASIA) is a
result of damage to Wernicke’s area of the brain. Aphasics who suffer from this disorder show these
symptoms:
(i) They have very fluent, rapid-fire speech—no production problem.
(ii) But they have great difficulty in understanding speech.
(iii) They find it very difficult, though not totally impossible, to match word meanings with the right
phonological representations.
(iv) Often patients either utter plain nonsense or produce circumlocutions.
THE MENTAL LEXICON 177

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These patients very often experience something like an acute version of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon
we saw earlier. They know the meaning they want to convey but are incapable of finding the right sound
envelope for it. They can find reasonably near synonyms, but not the word they want. So they get into
horrendously convoluted circumlocutions to paraphrase their intended meaning (e.g. ‘what you sleep in’
meaning ‘bed’ or ‘something in the mouth that you chew with’ meaning ‘teeth’. Their speech is generally
incoherent, as you can see from this typical example: 
[11.38]
Examiner: Do you like it here in Kansas City?
Aphasic:
Yes, I am.
Examiner: I’d like to have you tell me something about
your problem.
Aphasic:
Yes, I ugh can’t hill all of my way. I can’t talk all of the things I do, and part of the part I can go alright,
but I can’t tell from the other people. I usually most of my things. I know what I can talk and know what
they are, but I can’t always come back even though I know they should be in, and I know I should
something eely I should know what I’m doing…
(from Bissantz et al. 1985)
A word of caution is in order here. Any evidence from language disorders must be handled with care
since the workings of a malfunctioning brain may not mirror accurately the operation of a normal healthy
one. None the less, the difficulties experienced by this type of aphasic are attested in a milder form in the
tip-of-thetongue phenomenon in normal speakers.
To sum up, the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon and the circumlocution of aphasics with symptoms of
Wernicke’s aphasia suggest that the meaning of a word and the phonological shape that represents it are
stored separately in the mental lexicon. Related meanings are stored together as in a thesaurus and they are
not associated with their phonological representations initially. Further, the difficulties, if not total inability,
that sufferers from Broca’s aphasia have in forming grammatical words (i.e. words where roots have
inflectional morphemes) show that grammatical forms are put together at a different stage from content
words. Retrieval is successful only if all these facets of the word click into place at the right point.