Playing with your speech organ: An unfinished play in five acts

Abstract

Presented as an unachieved theater play, 4 this “paper” deals with the evolution of ideas concerning the relationships between the phonetic disintegration of non-fluent aphasics and the phonemic paraphasias of fluent aphasics. Act I summarizes how, soon after the turn of this century, neurologists, relying on half-implicit knowledge of the rule-governed nature of human languages, recognized three types of acquired dysfunctions impairing segmental production: the dysarthrias, anarthria and phonemic paraphasia. Act II underlines the influence of Troubetskoy's unachieved Grundzage der Phonologie and of the monograph by Alajouanine, Ombredane and Durand, entitled Le syndrome de désintégration phonétique dans l'aphasie (both published in 1939). In the context of Act III, psycholinguistics is presented as having given itself the task of testing the functional pertinency of linguistic theories, i.e. as concerned with the ways in which linguistic structures are dynamically processed by the human mind and its subserving brain. The problem of “false evaluation” in IPA transcripts of pathological speech is discussed at the beginning of Act IV; it is suggested that devoicing of voiced consonants, as observed in Broca's aphasia, is a phonetic rather than a phonological dysfunction (co-articulatory processing of segments, i.e. synchronous implementation of articulatory gestures is at fault, whereas underlying phonological targets are flawless). It is proposed, in Act V, that aphasiological dichotomies are bound to be somewhat mendacious. How, for instance, could the metathesis, assimilations and certain other deviation types observed in Broca's aphasia be phonetically constrained? Moreover, acoustical analyses of speech production have revealed the existence of subtle phonetic alterations in the discourse of Wernicke's jargonaphasics: how could these be phonologically constrained? The conclusion takes the form of a péroraison in which a fundamental question is raised as to the meaning of the prefix “neuro” in words such as neuropsychology and neurolinguistics.