Investigation of self-monitoring in fluent aphasia with jargon

Abstract

Background: Some individuals with fluent aphasia produce jargon errors in speech production. Jargon likely results from derailed encoding operations required for language production, although the exact mechanism remains debated. It is also unclear if persons who produce jargon are able to self-monitor; that is, detect the non-word status of their imminent utterance and self-correct the error.

Aims: This study investigated the characteristics of speech monitoring in individuals with fluent aphasia who produce jargon. The association of speech monitoring with amount of jargon produced and success in auditory comprehension was examined. Further, the role of post-articulatory auditory feedback on speech-monitoring success was examined by introducing an auditory masker (white noise). Finally, the influence of task demands on amount of jargon and speech monitoring was examined.

Methods & Procedures: Five individuals with fluent aphasia with jargon participated in the study. Speech monitoring was tested using three production tasks (picture naming, non-word repetition, and word repetition) under two listening conditions (normal listening and masking noise). Speech-monitoring score was derived from self-judgements of production accuracy. Auditory processing was examined in speech discrimination, lexical decision, and single-word identification tasks.

Outcomes & Results: Results indicated that severity of self-monitoring impairment is: (1) strongly correlated with severity of jargon production, (2) poorly correlated with auditory processing abilities, (3) worse under masking noise, and (4) worse for naming compared to repetition.

Conclusions: Overall, all five participants with jargon demonstrated severely impaired speech monitoring under both listening conditions across all three production tasks, suggesting that the role of speech-monitoring impairment in jargon cannot be disregarded. The increase in amount of jargon and severity of speech-monitoring failure with increased linguistic demands of the production task (as in picture naming and non-word repetition) raises the possibility of a post-semantic deficit in accessing phonological codes. This possible locus of deficit, and implications for understanding production of jargon, are discussed.

Keywords:

• Jargon
• Aphasia
• Self-monitoring
• Feedback
• Comprehension
• Lexical-phonological encoding

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the MCM Fund for Student Research Excellence to the first author from the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park. The authors wish to thank all the participants and their families for their participation and support for this research. We also acknowledge the assistance of Lauren Graham and Lisa Pyun in transcription and data analysis. We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Notes

The findings of this study were presented at the Annual Convention of the American Speech Language and Hearing Association (2009).