Word salad

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A word salad is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases", [1] most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The name schizophasia is used in particular to describe the confused language that may be evident in schizophrenia. [2] The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but they are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them. The term is often used in psychiatry as well as in theoretical linguistics to describe a type of grammatical acceptability judgement by native speakers, and in computer programming to describe textual randomization.

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Psychiatry

Word salad may describe a symptom of neurological or psychiatric conditions in which a person attempts to communicate an idea, but words and phrases that may appear to be random and unrelated come out in an incoherent sequence instead. Often, the person is unaware that they did not make sense. It appears in people with dementia and schizophrenia, [3] as well as after anoxic brain injury. In schizophrenia, it is called schizophasia. [2] Clang associations are especially characteristic of mania, as seen in bipolar disorder, as a somewhat more severe variation of flight of ideas. In extreme mania, the patient's speech may become incoherent, with associations markedly loosened, thus presenting as a veritable word salad.

It may be present as:

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thought disorder</span> Disorder of thought form, content or stream

A thought disorder (TD) is a disturbance in cognition which affects language, thought and communication. Psychiatric and psychological glossaries in 2015 and 2017 identified thought disorders as encompassing poverty of ideas, neologisms, paralogia, word salad, and delusions—all disturbances of thought content and form. Two specific terms have been suggested—content thought disorder (CTD) and formal thought disorder (FTD). CTD has been defined as a thought disturbance characterized by multiple fragmented delusions, and the term thought disorder is often used to refer to an FTD: a disruption of the form of thought. Also known as disorganized thinking, FTD results in disorganized speech and is recognized as a major feature of schizophrenia and other psychoses. Disorganized speech leads to an inference of disorganized thought. Thought disorders include derailment, pressured speech, poverty of speech, tangentiality, verbigeration, and thought blocking. One of the first known cases of thought disorders, or specifically OCD as it is known today, was in 1691. John Moore, who was a bishop, had a speech in front of Queen Mary II, about "religious melancholy."

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Graphomania, also known as scribomania, is an obsessive impulse to write. When used in a specific psychiatric context, it labels a morbid mental condition which results in writing rambling and confused statements, often degenerating into a meaningless succession of words or even nonsense then called graphorrhea. The term "graphomania" was used in the early 19th century by Esquirol and later by Eugen Bleuler, becoming more or less common. Graphomania is related to typomania, which is obsessiveness with seeing one's name in publication or with writing for being published, excessive symbolism or typology.

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In psychiatry, derailment categorises any speech that sequences of unrelated or barely related ideas compose; the topic often changes from one sentence to another.

In psychology, logorrhea or logorrhoea is a communication disorder that causes excessive wordiness and repetitiveness, which can cause incoherency. Logorrhea is sometimes classified as a mental illness, though it is more commonly classified as a symptom of mental illness or brain injury. This ailment is often reported as a symptom of Wernicke's aphasia, where damage to the language processing center of the brain creates difficulty in self-centered speech.

Thought blocking is a neuropsychological symptom expressing a sudden and involuntary silence within a speech, and eventually an abrupt switch to another topic. Persons undergoing thought blocking may utter incomprehensible speech; they may also repeat words involuntarily or make up new words. The main causes of thought blocking are schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, petit mal seizures, post-traumatic stress disorder, bradyphrenia, aphasia, dementia and delirium.

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.

The Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) is a rating scale that mental health professionals use to measure negative symptoms in schizophrenia. Negative symptoms are those conspicuous by their absence—lack of concern for one's appearance, and lack of language and communication skills, for example. Nancy Andreasen developed the scale and first published it in 1984. SANS splits assessment into five domains. Within each domain it rates separate symptoms from 0 (absent) to 5 (severe). The scale is closely linked to the Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms (SAPS), which was published a few years later. These tools are available for clinicians and for research.

Within psychological testing, the Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms (SAPS) is a rating scale to measure positive symptoms in schizophrenia. The scale was developed by Nancy Andreasen and was first published in 1984. SAPS is split into 4 domains, and within each domain separate symptoms are rated from 0 (absent) to 5 (severe). The scale is closely linked to the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) which was published a few years earlier.

In psychology, graphorrhea, or graphorrhoea, is a communication disorder expressed by excessive wordiness with minor or sometimes incoherent rambling, specifically in written work. Graphorrhea is most commonly associated with schizophrenia but can also result from several psychiatric and neurological disorders such as aphasia, thalamic lesions, temporal lobe epilepsy and mania. Some ramblings may follow some or all grammatical rules but still leave the reader confused and unsure about what the piece is about.

References

  1. "Definition of "word salad". Oxford University Press. 2012. Archived from the original on November 4, 2013.
  2. 1 2 "Medical Definition of SCHIZOPHASIA". www.merriam-webster.com. Retrieved 29 December 2019.
  3. Shives, Louise Rebraca (2008). Basic concepts of psychiatric-mental health nursing. Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer / Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. p. 112. ISBN   978-0-7817-9707-8.
  4. Geschwind, Norman (1974). Selected papers on language and the brain (2. print. ed.). Dordrecht; Boston: Reidel. p. 80. ISBN   9789027702623.
  5. "Merck Manual". merckmanuals.com. Merck Publishing. Retrieved 6 December 2014.