Phoneme frequency effects in jargon aphasia: A phonological investigation of nonword errors

Abstract

This study investigates the nonwords produced by a jargon speaker, LT. Despite presenting with severe neologistic jargon, LT can produce discrete responses in picture naming tasks thus allowing the properties of his jargon to be investigated. This ability was exploited in two naming tasks. The first showed that LT’s nonword errors are related to their targets despite being generally unrecognisable. This relatedness appears to be a general property of his errors suggesting that they are produced by lexical rather than nonlexical means. The second naming task used a set of stimuli controlled for their phonemic content. This allowed an investigation of target phonology at the level of individual phonemes. Nonword responses maintained the English distribution of consonants and showed a significant relationship to the target phonologies. A strong influence of phoneme frequency was identified. High frequency consonants showed a pattern of frequent but indiscriminate use. Low frequency consonants were realised less often but were largely restricted to target related contexts rarely appearing as error phonology. The findings are explained within a lexical activation network with the proposal that the resting levels of phoneme nodes are frequency sensitive. Predictions for the recovery of jargon aphasia and suggestions for future investigations are made.