A General Overview
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The psychopathology of language disorders A general overview J. Cutting Honorary Senior Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK Summary ject is in urgent need of a new approach, and the phenomeno- I provide an overview of the subject within which the other con- logical studies in this special issue are thus very timely. tributions to this special issue can be placed. The approach is descriptive rather than phenomenological, and my own view is Key words that the descriptive psychopathology in this area is a muddle. Linguists have made most progress so far, which is why I have Formal thought disorder • Aphasia • Non-aphasic misnaming • emphasised their contribution. My further view is that the sub- Schizophrenia Introduction age could cause a language disorder was subsequently widened to include Wernicke’s area, and the area in be- If spoken language is a species of signs, we can first di- tween this and Broca’s area), it was still a very small part vide the psychopathological material into disordered of the overall brain. sign systems of all sorts, including disordered spoken When language disorders were subsequently encoun- language. The other sign systems for which there is a psy- tered in patients with damage outside this classic region, chopathological literature are written language, music, it was considered that some other name should be given numbers and sign language for the deaf, each with their to these – hence non-aphasic misnaming – even though it corresponding expressive and receptive disorders (not was acknowledged that some aphasic patients with a le- considered further here). sion within the classic zone could have purely misnaming Within the confines of spoken language disorder, we can problems, a condition which was called nominal aphasia. 1 follow Saussure and distinguish la langue (the structure The paradoxical use of the term formal thought disorder of language) from la parole (speech). This gives two major to refer to a disorder of language arose because Bleuler 4 classes of language disorder – disordered language struc- considered thought disorder to be the primary and funda- ture and speech disorder. Within each of these there are mental deficit in schizophrenia, a view with which Schil- various subclasses. der concurred. But whereas Bleuler believed that delu- The subclassification of speech disorder adopted is arbi- sions as well as peculiarities of speech stemmed from trary, but it should be uncontroversial because there are thought disorder, Schilder considered that some distinc- no serious problematical issues to consider. However, tion should be made in the two cases. He thought that a the subclassification of disordered language needs some disorder of the form of thought was to blame in the latter discussion, because the three major traditional varieties case – hence formal thought disorder – but that a disorder – aphasia, non-aphasic misnaming and formal thought of content of thought was evident in the former. disorder – overlap with respect to the pattern of linguistic Two further issues can be briefly mentioned. One is breakdown, and the third of these was called such be- the duplication of terms for the same psychopathologi- cause the person who named it 2 did not believe that it cal entity. This is due to the independent description of was a language disorder at all. a suggested entity by neurologists and psychiatrists. We The reasons for all this muddle are as follows. Each of the encounter this problem throughout the whole realm of varieties was described and named by virtue of their link psychopathology. with some purported cause. A second is a further multiplication of terms for the same Aphasia was the first specific mental disorder of any sort psychopathological entity owing to disputes about what to be attributed, by Broca 3, to a lesion of a specific area modality of the human state is involved. There are a mul- of the brain. Although the area of the brain where dam- titude of psychological terms for what is essential the same Correspondence Mill Wood, Wall Hill, Forest Row, East Sussex, England RH18 5EG • E-mail: [email protected] 48 Journal of Psychopathology 2016;22:48-54 A general overview sort of thing: schizophasia (neurological orientation), formal not an exact replica of what is heard, in that the pronouns thought disorder (cognitive orientation), ‘crazy talk’ (behav- are reversed, and it is delayed. The acquired variety 12 has iourist orientation), communication disorder (social orienta- been reported in Gilles de Ia Tourette syndrome 13. tion) and pragmatic language disorder (linguistic analysis). Speech automatisms may take the form of either stereo- There is also plethora of clinical terms for the same manner typed utterances during an epileptic discharge 14 or ‘in- of speaking: knight’s move thinking, derailment, tangential- trusive inner speech vocalizations… natterings’ 15 in the ity, loosening of associations and loss of goal. context of focal brain damage. Despite all these problems, the tripartite division into aphasia, non-aphasic misnaming and formal thought dis- Altered prosody order will be adhered to here because, as I shall show, Aprosody and dysprosody are synonymous terms for a there are linguistic distinctions to be found to support the disorder of what Monrad-Krohn 16, who first described it, otherwise dubious nosological considerations. referred to as the ‘melody of language’. Prosody is now regarded as separable into two components: the stress Varieties of speech disorder and rhythm with which a subject pronounces each pho- neme, which make up his or her regional and individual Altered amount of speech accent – usually referred to as stress prosody (sometimes Pressure of speech is a morbid speeding up of the rate as linguistic or propositional prosody); and the emotional of otherwise normal speech. It is characteristic of mania. valence in the subject’s speech – usually referred to as af- Logorrhoea refers to the same entity, although in a neuro- fective or emotional prosody. Each of these components logical context – epilepsy, focal brain damage 5. Fisher 6 can be disordered in the expressive or receptive mode, coined another term for the same sort of thing, in a neu- giving rise to four types of aprosody: expressive stress rological context, except that the content was nonsensi- aprosody; receptive stress aprosody; expressive emotion- cal – nonsense speech amphigory. al aprosody; and receptive emotional aprosody. Monrad- Anarthria, literally ‘lack of speech’, is used for the mark- Krohn 17 also referred to hyperprosody – an exaggeration edly reduced output of speech accompanying the early of all prosodic components – which he believed could stages of a brain lesion inside the classical language area. occur in mania. This tends to move on to a severe expressive aphasia. Expressive stress aprosody is the cause of the ‘foreign ac- Mutism is the equivalent psychiatric term. cent syndrome’ 18, where the patient speaks with an ac- Poverty of speech is inappropriately laconic speech, and, cent resembling that of a native of another country. Mon- although no different from anarthria, is the term used in rad-Krohn’s 16 first patient was a Norwegian who began the context of schizophrenia. speaking like a German, which was acutely embarrassing for her because this happened during the German oc- Altered fluency of speech cupation of Norway and she was branded a collabora- Stuttering (stammering) can be defined as ‘silent or audi- tor. Both expressive stress aprosody and receptive stress ble involuntary repetition or prolongation of an utterance aprosody are associated with left hemisphere damage 19. of a sound’ or ‘a sound improperly patterned in time and Expressive and receptive varieties of emotional aproso- the speaker’s reaction to it’ 7. It can be developmental or dy are associated with right- hemisphere damage 20 or acquired. The acquired form is usually a consequence of schizophrenia 21. Subjects cannot express emotion in multiple bilateral cerebrovascular lesions or, if unilateral, their voice such that normal raters can determine which left-sided lesions 8. Joseph 9 observed it in two cases of of a number of standard emotions they are supposed depressive illness. to be expressing, nor distinguish a designated standard Palilalia is the ‘compulsive repetition of a phrase or word emotion in someone else’s voice. which the patient reiterates with increasing rapidity and 11 with a decrescendo of voice volume’ . It is involuntary Varieties of Language Disorder and could be classified in the next section, but the ‘in- creasing speed and decreasing distinctiveness’ of the ut- Aphasia terance is its most striking characteristic 10. General considerations. Broca’s aphasia (expressive aphasia, motor aphasia) is a severe breakdown in the Involuntary speech structure of the language required for expression. At the Echolalia is the involuntary repetition of someone else’s outset there may be no speech at all (anarthria). Later, speech. It may be developmental or acquired. The devel- the pattern is predominantly one of phonemic and syn- opmental variety is usually part of infantile autism; it is tactical errors. 49 J. Cutting Conduction aphasia is a condition where the repetition Rosselli 31 define a neologism as a word which cannot be of speech is disproportionately affected relative to other traced back to any extant dictionary word, whereas they speech performance 22. The other structural components regard a word like ‘summerly’ as a paraphasia because it are usually abnormal, but the problem with repetition is appears to derive from summer. In my view, the solution an over-riding defining feature. Transcortical motor apha- to all this is to retain the single term paraphasia for all sia and transcortical sensory aphasia are conditions in inaccurate word selections, regardless of purported cause which the repetition of speech is relatively well preserved and regardless of whether the result sounds like a genu- compared with spontaneous expression in the former and ine word in the subject’s lexicon or not.