The production of stereotyped neologisms in aphasia: A case study

This case study describes the speech production of the aphasic patient, T. W., whose oral speech is characterized by frequent stereotyped neologisms. In his spontaneous speech, particularly content words were replaced by neologisms, whereas function words were largely retained. In oral naming, the occurrence of neologisms was linked to target frequency. T. W.'s relatively good performance on those word-finding tasks not requiring overt speech speaks against an anomic blockage of word form access as the basis of his neologisms. T. W.'s writing to dictation of both words and non-words showed no recognizable similarities to his stereotyped oral output. For this reason it is concluded that the basis of T. W.'s stereotyped neologisms is modality specific and subphonemic. It is argued that the relationship between subphonemically generated stereotyped neologisms and lexical variables such as word class and word frequency cannot be accounted for by strictly modular models of language processing, but is in agreement with predictions of models incorporating assumptions of the interactive network approach.