Word deafness and Wernicke's aphasia: report of cases and discussion of the syndrome

FROM THE confusing mass of clinical symptoms displayed by patients with disorders of the speech mechanism, neurologists have been fairly well agreed on isolating "sensory aphasia" as a well-defined syndrome. As described by Wernicke, 1 this aphasia, which is now known by his name, consists of loss of comprehension of spoken language and loss of ability to write and read (silently), with power of articulate speech retained but distorted in that words and syllables are misplaced and mispronounced—paraphasia. Lichtheim 2 first described a different syndrome, in which the inability to understand spoken words was an isolated deficit—unaccompanied by distortion of spontaneous speech or by severe disturbance in writing or understanding the printed word. 3 Such a condition has been called "pure word deafness"; Wernicke, who thought that the phenomenon was correlated with a defect in conduction through subcortical layers of the temporal lobe from Heschl's gyrus to Area 42, stated