“My Mind Is Doing It All”

Objective: To study whether pressure of speech in jargon aphasia arises out of disturbances to core language or executive processes, or at the intersection of conceptual preparation. Background: Conceptual preparation mechanisms for speech have not been well studied. Several mechanisms have been proposed for jargon aphasia, a fluent, well-articulated, logorrheic propositional speech that is almost incomprehensible. Methods: We studied the vast quantity of jargon speech produced by patient J.A., who had suffered an infarct after the clipping of a middle cerebral artery aneurysm. We gave J.A. baseline cognitive tests and experimental word-and sentencegeneration tasks that we had designed for …