Repair Strategies and Consonantal Cluster Production in Broca’s Aphasia

It was indeed the merit of Roman Jakobson to draw aphasiology away from the mere surface description of symptoms and to provide the first interpretations of aphasics’ language disturbances in a linguistically motivated way (Jakobson, 1942). As far as segmental errors are concerned, he was thus able to interpret the nature of phonemic paraphasias by resorting to such linguistic theoretical constructs as features and markedness through which could be understood, for instance, the preferential tendencies often observed (on the paradigmatic axis) in phonemic substitutions, something that his predecessors —mainly clinicians — could not do! In the same way, although with less sophistication, (a) consonantal omissions within clusters were interpreted as simplification of so-called “syntagmatic” patterns and (b) some displacements of segments as assimilations such as the ones philologists had been observing for years in diachronic studies.