PERSEVERATION IN THE SPEECH OF A PATIENT WITH FLUENT ANOMIC APHASIA

The following is a study of an aphasic Norwegian patient with a fluent anomic type of aphasia. Coupled with his word-finding problem is a strong tendency to perseverate, to repeat a word when it is no longer appropriate to the context. Perseveration is often found in the speech of anomic patients; and normally perseveration of a specific word will take one of two forms: either (1) the perseverated word occurs interspersed throughout a dialogue or (2) it occurs only once or twice following its first occurrence. An unusual feature of this patient's anomia is that the perseveration of some words lasted for several weeks. The purpose of the paper is to describe the nature of the patient's perseverations-the structure of the perseverated elements, where in the utterance they occurred-and to propose an account of how and why they occurred as they did.