Wernicke’s area is one of two parts of the cerebral cortex of the brain (the other being Broca’s area) that is involved in language development. Located on the temporal lobe in the dominant cerebral hemisphere (on the left side of the brain for 90% of people), Wernicke’s area is responsible for the comprehension of speech, including semantic processing, recognition and interpretation, while the closely related Broca’s area is responsible for speech production.

Wernicke’s area is named after Carl Wernicke, a German neurologist and psychiatrist who hypothesized a link between the left temporal lobe and speech comprehension after observing a number of patients who suffered from aphasia after sustaining injuries to this region of the brain. Language development and usage can be seriously impaired by damage to the Wernicke’s area, and can cause a person to lose the ability to understand language.

Strangely, a person with damage to their Wernicke’s area may be able to speak clearly, but the words they string together are nonsensical; it has been called a “word salad” because all of their words are tossed haphazardly together like a salad. In contrast, damage to the Broca’s area of the brain can prevent a person from being able to produce or understand speech. These people often have difficulty properly forming words and their speech is slow and slurred.

According to the Geschwind-Wernicke model of language function developed in the 1960s and 1970s, when a person hears a word spoken, the signal is first processed in the brain’s primary auditory cortex, which then passes the signal to the Wernicke’s area. Wernicke’s area is responsible for associating the structure of the signal with the representation of the word stored in the memory, thus enabling a person to retrieve the meaning of the word.

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