The Conduction Theory and Neologistic Jargon

Abstract

In recent asphasiological studies of neologistic jargon, it has been postulated that the meaningless lexical items (most often functioning as nouns) produced (in otherwise well-formed syntactic matrices) by the patients result from severe phonological distortions of target forms. In this paper I claim that the above theory precludes explaining neologisms in terms of lexical retrieval disturbances, but rather must account for them in terms of lexical execution disturbances. That is, these theories must have a properly specified phonological string retrieved from the lexicon to serve as input to the phonemic distortion mechanism. I then show that, in many instances, neologisms adumbrate breakdowns in access to the lexicon. Subsequently, I propose another account for neologisms which is in better accord with an underlying word-finding disturbance and which incorporates the phenomenon of perseveration.