Speech and Writing Errors in “Neologistic Jargonaphasia”: A Lexical Activation Hypothesis

Neologisms, or literal paraphasias, occur commonly in the speech of many patients with Wernicke’s (alias “receptive,” “fluent” or “sensory”) aphasia. Very often these neologisms are reasonably close approximations to some identifiable target word, for example, “skut” (/skΛt/) for the target scout, or “stringt” (/strIŋt/) for the target word stream. The term neologistic jargon-aphasia has been applied to patients in whom the neologism is the predominant error form (see Buckingham & Kertesz, 1976; Butterworth, 1979; Caramazza, Berndt, & Basili, 1983; Ellis, Miller, & Sin, 1983; Miller, 1983).