Receptive aphasia is ?

• A. A type of aphasia where a person has trouble producing words.
• B. A language disorder that affects writing only.
• C. A type of aphasia where a person has trouble understanding words.
• D. A memory impairment not related to language.

Answer: (C)

Receptive aphasia means difficulty understanding spoken language. It usually results from damage to the language-dominant side of the brain (often near Wernicke’s area). People with this condition may speak in fluent, well-formed sentences, but their speech can be jumbled or meaningless to them because they can’t grasp the meaning of words and sentences they hear. The defining feature is impaired comprehension, not the ability to produce words. That’s why this description—trouble understanding words—best fits. The other options describe production problems (expressive aphasia), issues limited to writing, or non-language memory problems, which aren’t what receptive aphasia is.