Paraphasia is a type of language output error commonly associated with aphasia and characterized by the production of unintended syllables, words, or phrases during the effort to speak.
[2] The term was apparently introduced in 1877 by the German-English physician Julius Althaus in his book on Diseases of the Nervous System, in a sentence reading, "In some cases there is a perfect chorea or delirium of words, which may be called paraphasia".
All of these lead to a difference in processing efficiency, which is often caused by damage to a cortical region in the brain (in receptive aphasia, for example, the lesion is in or near Wernicke's area); lesion location is the most important determining factor for all aphasic disorders, including paraphasia – the location of the lesion can be used to hypothesize the type of aphasic symptoms the patient will display.
Broca's aphasia is characterized by non-fluent or telegraphic-type speech - where articles, conjunctions, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, pronouns and morphological inflections (plurals, past tense) are omitted.
[8] Wernicke's aphasia is characterized by fluent language with made up or unnecessary words with little or no meaning to speech.
Those who suffer from this type of aphasia have difficulty understanding others' speech and are unaware of their own mistakes.
[10] Neologistic paraphasias, a substitution with a non-English or gibberish word, follow pauses indicating word-finding difficulty.
It is hypothesized that verbal paraphasias are not the result of a random process but from a precise deficit in a single area.
There are commercially available workbooks that provide various activities such as letter, word-picture, or word-word matching, and sentence completion, among other things.
[4] A 1988 study by Mary Boyle proposed a method focused on oral reading to treat phonemic paraphasias, which was partially successful, resulting in fewer phonemic paraphasias but a slower rate of speech.
Although fewer phonemic paraphasias were produced due to this treatment, speaking efficiency was not improved by this study.
With navigated TMS (nTMS), nodes of the language network can be located presurgically so that critical areas can be saved when performing tumor or epilepsy surgery.