The Japanese journal of neuropsychology

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ArticleTitle	Non-meaningful recurrent utterance corresponding to verb
Language	J
AuthorList	Shintaro Komatsu¹⁾, Yoko Ohira²⁾, Masumi Watanabe¹⁾³⁾, Toru Imamura¹⁾
Affiliation	¹⁾Department of Speech Therapy, School of Health Sciences, Niigata University of Health and Welfare ²⁾Department of Rehabilitation, Sumitomo Besshi Hospital ³⁾Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Faculty of Health and Welfare, Prefectural University of Hiroshima
Publication	Japanese Journal of Neuropsychology: 32 (1), 65-73, 2016
Received	Jan 6, 2015
Accepted	May 20, 2015
Abstract	A 54-year-old right-handed male developed extensive infarction in the territory of the left middle cerebral artery. At 24 months after the onset, his auditory comprehension of single words was poor. His speech showed both anarthria and phonological paraphasia with profound word finding difficulty. The speech also showed non-meaningful recurrent utterances, many of which were "i-ta-i-te.", a four-mora non-meaning word in Japanese. There were some variant of this, such as "wa-ka-i-te" and "to-na-i-te". However, all recurrent utterances had [a] as the vowel of the 3rd last mora, [ite] as the last 2 moras and common pattern of pitch accent in the last 3 moras. The frequency of the recurrent utterances varied based on the degrees of propositionality in his utterances; only a few recurrent utterances occurred in free conversation and many of them occurred in the picture description task of the Standard Language Test of Aphasia (SLTA), which required high-propositional utterances. Therefore, we considered that his recurrent utterances did not have non-propositional nature, which is described in real word recurrent utterances. His recurrent utterances had the following characteristics: (1) they did not occur in the naming task of the SLTA, (2) the last 2 moras, which did not change among his recurrent utterances, were consistent with the endings of Japanese verbs, (3) some of them were preposed by a pronoun, such as "koko i-ta-i-te", or were followed by sentence-ending particle, and (4) they sometimes occurred when the patient explained a motion or act by writing, drawing or pointing. Therefore, his recurrent utterances were probably used as a verb.
Keywords	aphasia, non-meaningful recurrent utterance, real word recurrent utterance, verb, non-propositional utterance