Alliteration and Assonance in Neologistic Jargon Aphasia

Abstract

This paper discusses certain aspects of the speech patterns of neologistic jargon aphasic patients, whose syndrome is one form of a more general classification referred to as Wernicke's or cortical sensory aphasia. The classical lesion site is in the posterior superior temporal convolution of the dominant hemisphere. Patients with such lesions typically have difficulties in the comprehension of auditory linguistic stimuli and their speech is often marked with neologistic jargon. A neologism is a phonological form produced by the patient for which one cannot recover with any reasonable degree of certainty some single item in the patient's vocabulary as it presumably existed before the onset of the disease. Specific analysis is focused on those stretches of speech which exhibit perseveration to the point where there is an excessive amount of alliteration and assonance. The data is described in terms of segments, syllables and sequences of syllables and related to both a mechanism underlying the production of this sort of speech and to the more general problems of neologisms in jargon aphasia.