HESITATION AND THE PRODUCTION OF VERBAL PARAPHASIAS AND NEOLOGISMS IN JARGON APHASIA

Techniques of hesitation analysis taken from studies of normal speakers were applied to the speech of a jargon aphasic. Neologisms were found to follow pauses indicating a word-finding difficulty. Other language functions-phonology, morphology, and syntax-appeared unimpaired, and further analyses of the linguistic and temporal characteristics indicated a single functional disorder in which there is a failure in the mechanisms which associate word-sounds with word-meanings. The patient strategically adapts to this functional impairment by substituting a neologism when lexical search fails. The source of a large class of neologisms, it is hypothesized, is a device which quasirandomly combines English phonemes in a phonotactically regular way. The implications for recovery patterns in jargon aphasia are discussed; and the implications of this case for models of normal language production are explored. © 1979.