An area of the brain located in the posterior temporal lobe of the cerebral hemisphere and concerned with understanding language, whether as speech or written words. It is named after the German neurologist Carl Wernicke (1848–1905), who identified its crucial role in comprehending meaning; patients with lesions in this area cannot understand simple instructions, and produce confused or incoherent speech. Wernicke’s area receives nervous inputs from the auditory and visual cortices and is thought to associate these inputs with speech sounds, which are then articulated by Broca’s area. Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas form part of a complex language-processing network that occurs most commonly in the left cerebral hemisphere (in 90% of right-handed and 70% of left-handed persons).