Ukeleles, condessors, and fosetch: Varieties of aphasic jargon

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Abstract The term jargonaphasia designates a superordinate category referring to several distinct forms of language disturbance, each of which severely limits the communicative value of speech in a different way. The three types of aphasic jargon are discussed in this paper. Semantic jargon is characterized by the production of fluent, well-articulated utterances which are semantically aberrant but have no more than occasional phonemic or neologistic errors. In neologistic jargon, neologisms replace content words, leaving the remaining part of the utterance, including grammatical function markers, unaffected. Finally, phonemic jargon refers to speech in which meaning is entirely absent, and there are few if any recognizable words or word-like units. The varieties of jargon discussed in this paper are symptoms of a language disturbance characterized by the normal but inefficient pre-processing of language at different points along the processing continuum from thought to articulated speech. Such symptoms may provide insight into the relations among levels of representation of linguistic knowledge and particularly into the nature of the emergence, in perception and production, of semantic and phonemic representations. It is concluded that each of the forms of jargonaphasia is distinct with regard to the specific locus of the disruption of sound and meaning representation. Each is referable to a different stage in the cognitive microgenesis of an utterance. In other words, each form of jargonaphasia points to the level of linguistic representation corresponding to a specific stage in the psychological (microgenetic) unfolding of a linguistic act.