Jargon aphasia

Last updated July 10, 2022

Jargon aphasia is a type of fluent aphasia in which an individual's speech is incomprehensible, but appears to make sense to the individual. Persons experiencing this condition will either replace a desired word with another that sounds or looks like the original one, or has some other connection to it, or they will replace it with random sounds. Accordingly, persons with jargon aphasia often use neologisms, and may perseverate if they try to replace the words they can not find with sounds.^{[ citation needed ]}

Causes

People affected by jargon aphasia usually are elderly and/or people who have damage to the neural pathways of certain parts of the brain. This is usually the result of the following conditions:^[1]

Since jargon is associated with fluent (Wernicke's) aphasia, it is usually caused by damage to the temporal lobe, and more specifically, Wernicke's area. After the condition is diagnosed, a CT or MRI scan is typically used to determine the location and severity of the brain damage that has caused the aphasia.^[1]

There have been cases in which aphasia has developed after damage to only the right hemisphere of the brain. These cases are few and far between, and usually involve unique circumstances for the individual. Most commonly, these results can stem from brain organization that is different than the general population, or a heavier than normal reliance on the right hemisphere of the brain.^[2]

Diagnosis

Someone with jargon aphasia may exhibit the following behaviors:^[3]

intermixing real words and nonsensical words while speaking or writing
failing to recognize mistakes being made while speaking or writing
using real words in incorrect situations
frequent, repetitive uttering of low-frequency words
the inability to say or write a specific word or phrase

Some of the specific types of language errors that occur are:^[4]

lexical (real word)

semantic: Real word that was semantically related to target. ("dog" instead of "cat")
formal: Real word that shared either the initial phoneme or at least 50% of phonemes with target. ("dog" instead of "desk" or "dog" instead of "frog")
mixed: Real word that was both semantically and phonologically related to target. ("bicycle" instead of "motorcycle")
visual: Real word of an item similar in visual form to the target. ("ball" instead of "orange")
unrelated: Real word that was not related to the target in any obvious way. ("dog" instead of "apple")

non-lexical (nonword)

phonological: Nonword that shared either the initial phoneme or at least 50% of phonemes with target. ("deg" instead of "dog")
neologistic: Nonword not reaching the criterion for phonological relatedness (i.e., sharing less than 50% of phonemes with the target and with a different initial phoneme). Nonwords that are pseudo-compound words. ("kib" instead of "dog")

other errors

Don't know: Indication that response was unknown or item was not responded to at all. ("I don’t know" or silence)
description: Attempts to describe as opposed to name item. (Multiple word responses)

Jargon aphasia must be diagnosed through a series of tests. Since the number of individuals that have aphasia after suffering a stroke is high, a test is usually carried out soon after the stroke occurs. There is a list of basic exercises to help assess a person's language skills, such as:

naming objects that begin with a certain letter
reading or writing
holding a conversation
understanding directions and commands

There is also a common test used, called the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination test, which incorporates exercises that extensively review the person's language skills.^[1]

Treatments

The only way to treat aphasia is with a speech-language pathologist (SLP). It will not completely restore the person's prior level of communication, but SLP can lead to a massive improvement of jargon aphasia. Recipients of this treatment typically achieve better use of residual language abilities, improved language skills, and the ability to communicate in a different way by making up for missing words in their speech.^[1]

One specific method that has shown to lead to improvements with certain symptoms is phonological component analysis, or PCA for short. Participants in PCA therapy tend to improve in the ability to name specific items that they are test on, as well as the decrease in use of nonwords to describe said items. Seeing promising results from this type of therapy has led to much optimism in hopes of developing more treatment methods for jargon aphasia.^[5]

History

Hughlings Jackson is believed to have been the person who initially contributed the term "jargon" to aphasiology. He used this term not to distinguish a separate type of aphasia, but to describe the language output of certain people that was meaningless and incomprehensible to the listener, although it appeared to have some meaning for the speaker.^[3]

Other meanings and types

There are many different meanings when people refer to jargon aphasia. Since Hughling Jackson's time, it has covered a broad range of similar verbal behaviors and has been used to describe a multitude of different aphiastic disturbances. Some of the behaviors are described as the person having speaking in a "confused, unintelligible language", "a strange, outlandish, or barbarous dialect", "a hybrid language", and can be referred to as a pretentious language marked by circumlocutions and long words. Observation of these behaviors has led to a branching of different types of jargon.

Neologistic jargon is the production of language containing non-existent words that are not related to what the person is attempting to convey.
Phonemic jargon is the production of language containing inappropriate words that are phonemically related to what the person is attempting to convey.
Semantic jargon is the production of language which is devoid of content and consists of real words that are inappropriate given the context of the situation.

All of these types of jargon are seen in fluent aphasia, which can more commonly be addressed as Wernicke's aphasia.^[4]^[6]

Contradictions and different viewpoints

Weinstein: Weinstein's viewpoint of jargon illustrates just the basic rambling and incoherent but structurally intact speech. It does not include details about neologisms and paraphasias. He and his coworkers view jargon as a positive symptom of aphasia, and as an adaptive behavior and form of denial, or anosognosia, in the presence of language deficit.
Schuell: Shuell views jargon as the result of severe impairment in the recall of learned auditory patterns and imperfect auditory feedback processes. The lack of control of verbal output is related to reduced auditory input.
Cohn and Neumann: Their viewpoint is that jargon results from the disruption of the sequential ordering of speech.
Alajouanine: Alajouanine's viewpoint highlights that the reason for jargon cannot be found in the breakdown of the intrinsic speech structure itself. He stressed that incomprehensibility and lack of meaning, rather than articulatory abnormality or lack of proper grammatical sequencing were the essence of jargon. He often spoke of a "suppression of the semantic values of language" in jargon.^[6]

Related Research Articles

Aphasia Inability to comprehend or formulate language

Aphasia is an inability to comprehend or formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions. The major causes are stroke and head trauma; prevalence is hard to determine but aphasia due to stroke is estimated to be 0.1–0.4% in the Global North. Aphasia can also be the result of brain tumors, brain infections, or neurodegenerative diseases.

In neuroscience and psychology, the term language center refers collectively to the areas of the brain which serve a particular function for speech processing and production. Language is a core system, which gives humans the capacity to solve difficult problems and provides them with a unique type of social interaction. Language allows individuals to attribute symbols to specific concepts and display them through sentences and phrases that follow proper grammatical rules. Moreover, speech is the mechanism in which language is orally expressed.

Receptive aphasia Language disorder involving inability to understand language

Wernicke's aphasia, also known as receptive aphasia, sensory aphasia or posterior aphasia, is a type of aphasia in which individuals have difficulty understanding written and spoken language. Patients with Wernicke's aphasia demonstrate fluent speech, which is characterized by typical speech rate, intact syntactic abilities and effortless speech output. Writing often reflects speech in that it tends to lack content or meaning. In most cases, motor deficits do not occur in individuals with Wernicke's aphasia. Therefore, they may produce a large amount of speech without much meaning. Individuals with Wernicke's aphasia are typically unaware of their errors in speech and do not realize their speech may lack meaning. They typically remain unaware of even their most profound language deficits.

Broca's area, or the Broca area, is a region in the frontal lobe of the dominant hemisphere, usually the left, of the brain with functions linked to speech production.

Neurolinguistics Neuroscience and linguistics-related studies

Neurolinguistics is the study of neural mechanisms in the human brain that controls the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methods and theories from fields such as neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive science, communication disorders and neuropsychology. Researchers are drawn to the field from a variety of backgrounds, bringing along a variety of experimental techniques as well as widely varying theoretical perspectives. Much work in neurolinguistics is informed by models in psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics, and is focused on investigating how the brain can implement the processes that theoretical and psycholinguistics propose are necessary in producing and comprehending language. Neurolinguists study the physiological mechanisms by which the brain processes information related to language, and evaluate linguistic and psycholinguistic theories, using aphasiology, brain imaging, electrophysiology, and computer modeling.

Aphasiology is the study of language impairment usually resulting from brain damage, due to neurovascular accident—hemorrhage, stroke—or associated with a variety of neurodegenerative diseases, including different types of dementia. These specific language deficits, termed aphasias, may be defined as impairments of language production or comprehension that cannot be attributed to trivial causes such as deafness or oral paralysis. A number of aphasias have been described, but two are best known: expressive aphasia and receptive aphasia.

Agraphia is an acquired neurological disorder causing a loss in the ability to communicate through writing, either due to some form of motor dysfunction or an inability to spell. The loss of writing ability may present with other language or neurological disorders; disorders appearing commonly with agraphia are alexia, aphasia, dysarthria, agnosia, acalculia and apraxia. The study of individuals with agraphia may provide more information about the pathways involved in writing, both language related and motoric. Agraphia cannot be directly treated, but individuals can learn techniques to help regain and rehabilitate some of their previous writing abilities. These techniques differ depending on the type of agraphia.

Anomic aphasia is a mild, fluent type of aphasia where individuals have word retrieval failures and cannot express the words they want to say. Anomia is a deficit of expressive language. Anomia is a symptom of all forms of aphasia, but patients whose primary deficit is word retrieval are diagnosed with anomic aphasia. Individuals with aphasia who display anomia can often describe an object in detail and maybe even use hand gestures to demonstrate how the object is used, but cannot find the appropriate word to name the object. Patients with anomic aphasia have relatively preserved speech fluency, repetition, comprehension, and grammatical speech.

Wernickes area Speech comprehension region in the dominant hemisphere of the hominid brain

Wernicke's area, also called Wernicke's speech area, is one of the two parts of the cerebral cortex that are linked to speech, the other being Broca's area. It is involved in the comprehension of written and spoken language, in contrast to Broca's area, which is involved in the production of language. It is traditionally thought to reside in Brodmann area 22, which is located in the superior temporal gyrus in the dominant cerebral hemisphere, which is the left hemisphere in about 95% of right-handed individuals and 70% of left-handed individuals.

Conduction aphasia, also called associative aphasia, is an uncommon form of difficulty in speaking (aphasia). It is caused by damage to the parietal lobe of the brain. An acquired language disorder, it is characterised by intact auditory comprehension, coherent speech production, but poor speech repetition. Affected people are fully capable of understanding what they are hearing, but fail to encode phonological information for production. This deficit is load-sensitive as the person shows significant difficulty repeating phrases, particularly as the phrases increase in length and complexity and as they stumble over words they are attempting to pronounce. People have frequent errors during spontaneous speech, such as substituting or transposing sounds. They are also aware of their errors and will show significant difficulty correcting them.

Global aphasia is a severe form of nonfluent aphasia, caused by damage to the left side of the brain, that affects receptive and expressive language skills as well as auditory and visual comprehension. Acquired impairments of communicative abilities are present across all language modalities, impacting language production, comprehension, and repetition. Patients with global aphasia may be able to verbalize a few short utterances and use non-word neologisms, but their overall production ability is limited. Their ability to repeat words, utterances, or phrases is also affected. Due to the preservation of the right hemisphere, an individual with global aphasia may still be able to express themselves through facial expressions, gestures, and intonation. This type of aphasia often results from a large lesion of the left perisylvian cortex. The lesion is caused by an occlusion of the left middle cerebral artery and is associated with damage to Broca's area, Wernicke's area, and insular regions which are associated with aspects of language.

Language processing in the brain "algorithmia-node.js"

Language processing refers to the way humans use words to communicate ideas and feelings, and how such communications are processed and understood. Language processing is considered to be a uniquely human ability that is not produced with the same grammatical understanding or systematicity in even human's closest primate relatives.

Speech is human vocal communication using language. Each language uses phonetic combinations of vowel and consonant sounds that form the sound of its words, and using those words in their semantic character as words in the lexicon of a language according to the syntactic constraints that govern lexical words' function in a sentence. In speaking, speakers perform many different intentional speech acts, e.g., informing, declaring, asking, persuading, directing, and can use enunciation, intonation, degrees of loudness, tempo, and other non-representational or paralinguistic aspects of vocalization to convey meaning. In their speech speakers also unintentionally communicate many aspects of their social position such as sex, age, place of origin, physical states, psychological states, physico-psychological states, education or experience, and the like.

Paraphasia is a type of language output error commonly associated with aphasia, and characterized by the production of unintended syllables, words, or phrases during the effort to speak. Paraphasic errors are most common in patients with fluent forms of aphasia, and come in three forms: phonemic or literal, neologistic, and verbal. Paraphasias can affect metrical information, segmental information, number of syllables, or both. Some paraphasias preserve the meter without segmentation, and some do the opposite. However, most paraphasias affect both partially.

Deep dyslexia is a form of dyslexia that disrupts reading processes. Deep dyslexia may occur as a result of a head injury, stroke, disease, or operation. This injury results in the occurrence of semantic errors during reading and the impairment of nonword reading.

Paragrammatism is the confused or incomplete use of grammatical structures, found in certain forms of speech disturbance. Paragrammatism is the inability to form grammatically correct sentences. It is characteristic of fluent aphasia, most commonly receptive aphasia. Paragrammatism is sometimes called "extended paraphasia," although it is different from paraphasia. Paragrammatism is roughly synonymous with "word salad," which concerns the semantic coherence of speech rather than its production.

Auditory agnosia is a form of agnosia that manifests itself primarily in the inability to recognize or differentiate between sounds. It is not a defect of the ear or "hearing", but rather a neurological inability of the brain to process sound meaning. While auditory agnosia impairs the understanding of sounds, other abilities such as reading, writing, and speaking are not hindered. It is caused by bilateral damage to the anterior superior temporal gyrus, which is part of the auditory pathway responsible for sound recognition, the auditory "what" pathway.

Speech repetition Repeating something someone else said

Speech repetition occurs when individuals speak the sounds that they have heard another person pronounce or say. In other words, it is the saying by one individual of the spoken vocalizations made by another individual. Speech repetition requires the person repeating the utterance to have the ability to map the sounds that they hear from the other person's oral pronunciation to similar places and manners of articulation in their own vocal tract.

Surface dyslexia is a type of dyslexia, or reading disorder. According to Marshall & Newcombe's (1973) and McCarthy & Warrington's study (1990), patients with this kind of disorder cannot recognize a word as a whole due to the damage of the left parietal or temporal lobe. Individuals with surface dyslexia are unable to recognize a word as a whole word and retrieve its pronunciation from memory. Rather, individuals with surface dyslexia rely on pronunciation rules. Thus, patients with this particular type of reading disorder read non-words fluently, like "yatchet", but struggle with words that defy pronunciation rules. For example, a patient with surface dyslexia can correctly read regular words like "mint", but will err when presented a word that disobeys typical pronunciation rules, like "pint". Often, semantic knowledge is preserved in individuals with surface dyslexia.

Phonological dyslexia is a reading disability that is a form of alexia, resulting from brain injury, stroke, or progressive illness and that affects previously acquired reading abilities. The major distinguishing symptom of acquired phonological dyslexia is that a selective impairment of the ability to read pronounceable non-words occurs although the ability to read familiar words is not affected. It has also been found that the ability to read non-words can be improved if the non-words belong to a family of pseudohomophones.

References

1 2 3 4 Paddock, M. (2014). "What is aphasia? What causes aphasia?". Medical News Today. Retrieved 2015-05-01.
↑ Coppens, Patrick; Hungerford, Suzanne; Yamaguchi, Satoshi; Yamadori, Atsushi (December 2002). "Crossed aphasia: an analysis of the symptoms, their frequency, and a comparison with left-hemisphere aphasia symptomatology". Brain & Language. 83 (3): 425–463. doi:10.1016/s0093-934x(02)00510-2. PMID 12468397. S2CID 46650843.
1 2 Marshall, Jane (2006-05-01). "Jargon aphasia: What have we learned?". Aphasiology. 20 (5): 387–410. doi:10.1080/02687030500489946. S2CID 144086079.
1 2 Rohrer, Jonathan D.; Rossor, Martin N.; Warren, Jason D. (2009-02-15). "Neologistic jargon aphasia and agraphia in primary progressive aphasia". Journal of the Neurological Sciences. 277 (1–2): 155–159. doi: 10.1016/j.jns.2008.10.014 . PMC 2633035 . PMID 19033077.
↑ Bose, Arpita (2013-09-21). "Phonological therapy in jargon aphasia: effects on naming and neologisms". International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders. 48 (5): 582–595. doi:10.1111/1460-6984.12038. PMID 24033655.
1 2 Rau, Marie T. Jargon Aphasia: A confusing state of affairs (PDF).