Implications of preserved written language abilities for the functional basis of speech automatisms (recurring utterances): A single case study

Abstract

A patient is described whose oral speech consists exclusively of repetitively used stereotypical utterances (speech automatisms) but whose written performance is far better preserved. Written language investigation revealed that his phonological route for writing was not totally blocked. In writing to dictation, word length and syllabic structure were largely respected, even for nonwords. Picture-matching tasks which manipulated phonological similarity demonstrated relatively preserved access to lexical phonology. A nonlexical and sub-phonemic hypothesis of automatism-generation is proposed.