Paraphasia

Paraphasia (also known as paragrammatism) is a notable feature of aphasia (also known as dysphasia) in which one loses the ability of speaking correctly, substitutes one word for another, and changes words and sentences in an inappropriate way. The patient's speech is fluent but is said in an error, e.g. 'treen' instead of 'train'.

Paraphasia can be further sub-divided into 3 categories: Literal/phonological paraphasia, neologistic paraphasias and verbal paraphasias. In literal/phonological paraphasia, more than half of the spoken word is said correctly. An example could be saying pun instead of spun. Neologistic refers to a spoken word that is said less than half correct. Occasionally the word is not said correctly at all. This is common in the speech of patients with schizophrenia. The last is verbal paraphasia where another word is substituted for the target word. A common example is saying dog instead of cat.

While low-frequency paraphasic errors can occur in normal speech, paraphasias (particularly phonological paraphasias) are considerably more common in Wernicke's aphasia and in Sensory Transcortical Aphasia.