Another video from the archives of the University of Wisconsin at Madison Physiology department shows an interview with a patient with Wernicke's aphasia. Unlike patients with Broca's aphasia, Wernicke's aphasics tend to speak fluently, but their speech often degenerates into seemingly random, very hard to follow "streams of consciousness", which may be peppered with non-words or made up words. Also, the speech of Wernicke's aphasics often fails to provide good answers to questions posed to them, suggesting that they do not really understand the speech of their interviewers. This difficulty in comprehension rather than articulation has led to Wernicke's aphasia being described as a "receptive aphasia".
Wernicke's aphasia is usually associated with lesions to "Wernicke's area", a piece of cortical tissue at the boundary between the parietal and temporal lobes.