Linguistic features in palilalia: two case studies

Palilalia is a speech disorder that is not often reported in the literature . This paper presents details of a linguistic analysis of the reiterations of two palilalic patients: a 17-year-old boy with diffuse brain damage subs equent to a motor vehicle accident and a 56-year-old woman who over time su ffered two cerebrovascular accidents affecting respectively the left and th e right hemisphere. The analysis included a determination of the frequency of occurrence of reiterations in different speech tasks, a determination of the severity of the reiterations, an analysis of the locus of the reiterat ions within an utterance, an assessment of the grammatical characteristics of the words reiterated, a description of the phonological characteristics of the words reiterated, and an analysis of the types of reiteration demons trated. Results suggest that palilalia is not a uniform disorder but can ma nifest in different forms and that the core problem in palilalia is not onl y a matter of inhibition of speech but also of the initiation and progressi on of speech.