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Allolalia
Allolalia is any defect in speech, especially
one that is caused by a disorder involving the
cerebrum, which is the top section of the
brain. A good example would be the speech
defects that accompany Broca’s aphasia
(also known as non-fluent aphasia or
expressive aphasia) in which speech is
slowed, disjointed (non-fluent) and difficult to
produce due to damage to Broca’s area
(located in the left frontal lobe of the brain).
Such a person may sound like this when
describing their favorite food:
Treating a patient with allolalia.
“Food….pizza….me….like.” The words may also be spoken loudly with a lot of stress on
them, emphasizing the difficulty of speech production.
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Other types of speech defects include stuttering, inarticulate speech, and apraxia of
speech (poor motor planning to produce speech). An extreme speech defect is mutism in
which a person does not speak at all. There are also receptive speech disorders, in
which a person has deficient speech production related to difficulty comprehending
speech. This is known as receptive aphasia (or Wernicke’s aphasia) and is due to
damage to Wernicke’s area (located in a side area of the brain near the ear known as
the left temporal lobe).
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Receptive aphasia is also known as fluent aphasia because the
speech is fluent. However, it is also non-sensical (and often
excessive) because random and made-up words are used,
important words are left out of sentences, tenses of verbs are
incorrect, and word substitutions occur.
An example of a sentence spoken by a person with receptive
aphasia would be: “The purple stairs took me to the right away
place left on the window.” Allolalia comes from the Greek word
"allos" meaning "other," and the Greek word "lalia" meaning "talking."
Put the words together and you get "other talking.”
