Jargon aphasia


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.

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:
Since jargon is associated with fluent 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.
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.

Diagnosis

Someone with jargon aphasia may exhibit the following behaviors:
Some of the specific types of language errors that occur are:
; lexical
; non-lexical
; other errors
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:
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.

Treatments

The only way to treat aphasia is with a speech-language pathologist. 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.
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.

History

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.

Other meanings and types

There are lots of 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.
All of these types of jargon are seen in fluent aphasia, which can more commonly be addressed as Wernicke's aphasia.

Contradictions and different viewpoints

; Weinstein
; Schuell
; Cohn and Neumann
; Alajouanine