ABSTRACT
Some category classification of sleep-speeches into degrees of dissociation was presented partly as an organizing perspective and partly as an attempt to delineate and capture real differences between types of sleep-utterance episodes. W. S. Walsh reported that the sleep-speech of mentally defective subjects in most instances was “intelligible”. There is almost as much variability in sleep-speech as there is in wakeful speech and one cannot provide, therefore, a concise description of the “typical” sleep-speech. The population of sleep-speeches employed in the determination was drawn from 468 spontaneous episodes containing at least one intelligible word uttered by 31 chronic sleep-talkers, all of which were tape-recorded in the laboratory, and for which the associated sleep stage had been classified by the senior author. Comments on the structural features of spontaneous sleep-speech are based perforce on naturally occurring fragments of sequences that are of varying linguistic completeness.
