Self–repairs in Spanish anomic aphasia. A case study

Abstract

Anomic aphasia is a neurological disorder characterized by constant problems in lexical access. These can range from a slight difficulty producing desired words during conversation to the virtual inability to produce nouns under any condition. Descriptions of this syndrome point to long silences, false starts, and constant repetitions as problematic elements in lexical access. This paper discusses these descriptions from the analysis of four elicited stories narrated by a speaker with anomic aphasia. The speaker uses self-repair operations, including searching, recycling, deletion, and pauses between intonation units. Based on these data, a classification tool is presented that allows observations about the most recurrent grammatical forms in each of self-repair operations, which provides information about the processes incurred by the speaker with anomic aphasia to access lexical elements. Self-repairs are presented as elements that favor discursive continuity using specific linguistics elements, particularly the noun phrase.