Cross-Generic Dimension Of The Production Of Phonological Paraphasias And Neologisms By People With Aphasia

Abstract

Taking into account the still pending problem of uniformity versus heterogeneity with which the phonological deficit manifests itself across various aphasia syndromes as well as the virtual absence of any cross-generic explorations of the quantitative and qualitative production patterns of phonological and neologistic paraphasias, we have set the goal of enriching the present-day body of aphasiologic and neurolinguistic knowledge with novel theoretical and practical insights by getting a number of relevant questions answered. These include the ones about the syndrome-universality versus specificity of phonological errors, the effect of discourse elicitation genre on the number of erroneous productions and the diversity of their categories alongside the effect of within-genre task complexity on the phonological output of Russian-speaking individuals diagnosed with five different types of aphasia. To accomplish our goal, we have conducted a rigorous quantitative and qualitative hierarchical cluster analysis of the phonological errors detected in the interview samples of 18 participants whose oral productive performance on the tasks belonging to four distinct discourse genres was recorded on a high-quality sound-recording device and transcribed using the combination of the Jefferson Transcription System and the International Phonetic Alphabet one. The results obtained demonstrate that the phonological error production patterns cannot be relied on in distinguishing various aphasia types. They also show that each discourse genre is marked by its own degree of mental processing complexity and is, thus, associated with a numerically distinct picture of errors. Moreover, the degree of task complexity has been found to be a matter of individual perception. Last but not least, the previous researchers’ findings pertaining to paraphasias have been compared to our data, and some of the earlier structural hypotheses have been unsupported. Our study is expected to be of great value and utility from the viewpoint of furthering the development of theoretical knowledge about the phonological breakdown in the language disorder under scrutiny specifically from the perspective of aphasics’ engagement in everyday discourse situations, refining the existing speech production models or developing new more realistic and viable ones, and generating ideas for practical solutions in speech-language pathology.