PARAGRAMMATS: Definition, Examples, Symptoms, Causes and Treatment

The brain of people is the most complex organ we have as it is made up of millions and millions of interconnected cells. That is why any brain damage can have great consequences on the person who suffers it as it is responsible for the functioning of the rest of our body.

There are a series of regions, which, if damaged, can produce errors in the language of an individual. They can be broadly divided into fluent speech injuries and non-fluent speech injuries. This means whether the person is able to speak fluently and with long sentences, or on the contrary, can only use simple structures.

In this Psychology-Online article we are going to focus on non-fluent speech disorders. Specifically, of a language disorder known as paragrammatism. We must point out that after a bibliographic review, not many studies related to this disease have been found.

Index

1. What is paragrammatism: meaning
2. Difference between agrammatism and paragrammatism
3. Symptoms of paragrammatism with examples
4. Causes of paragrammatism
5. Treatment of paragrammatism

Pragmatism is a disturbance in spoken language as a result of damage to different areas of the brain causing what is known as aphasia (language disorders). Pragmatism can be classified within fluent aphasias, that is, those in which the affected people can express themselves effortlessly, with few failures in articulation, but with speech lacking in content, vocabulary, etc.

People affected with pragrammatism tend to disorganize sentences, replacing correct forms with incorrect grammatical forms.

In the following article you will find more information about the psychology of language.

While in paragrammatism the affected person can speak fluently, in agrammatism, those with this disorder present great difficulties when using complex syntactic constructions.

As characteristics of agrammatism, people have problems with grammatical morphemes, that is, they are not able to correctly use prepositions, articles, pronouns, etc. So their sentences are usually quite simple and with a reduced length. In turn, they present difficulties in accessing the verb forms, this is what is known as noun-verb dissociation, as well as in the correct ordering of the words.

Subjects with this type of language disorder are characterized by the following symptoms:

• Failures in word order, syntactic or morphological structure. The person substitutes the order of the phrase for a set of phrases which apparently have a correct structure but that, when analyzing the globality of the text, no coordination is found between they. An example of this paragrammatic symptom would be: "I trust you a lot."
• Exaggerated length of sentences. This symptom is a consequence of the characteristic jargon and verbiage. It is common for several topic changes to appear in the same statement. An example of this symptom of paragrammatism would be: "The mother is the dishes when you dry them and water them without realizing it, she fell, fell where the floor and the child is falling."
• Substitution of functional words or inflectional affixes. They tend to replace the words by others from the same semantic field or by others with which there are features of similarity to the functional word. An example of this characteristic of paragrammatism would be to use lattice instead of pencil or say table when they want to say chair.

Since they usually appear in fluent aphasias, we find different cases in which brain injuries can lead to paragrammatism. The lesions that produce this language disorder must occur in the area posterior to the central sulcus.

• Wernicke's aphasia: lesion in the cortical areas of language, specifically in the dominant temporal lobe. These people have trouble repeating sentences, understanding, as well as naming objects. Here you can see the characteristics and functions of the Wernicke area.
• Conduction aphasia: lesion in the cortical areas of language, in the posterior perisylvian regions of the dominant hemisphere. These people have trouble repeating sentences, as well as naming objects.
• Sensory transcortical aphasia: lesion in the bordering areas (adjoining) to the cortical areas of the language. They are lesions in borderline parieto-temporal areas. These people have problems in understanding, as well as in naming objects.

Since this language disorder can affect different forms of expression, from psychology It is recommended to treat aphasia as a global condition, so there is a tendency to opt for carrying out a neurorehabilitation treatment.

This tries to cognitively rehabilitate the injured brain areas by performing a series of exercises and tasks that aim to work on language and communication. However, in many cases the rehabilitative treatment is linked to a speech therapy treatment, so that the sentences are worked on at a morphological and syntactic level. But, as we say every time we indicate a possible treatment, we recommend the visit a specialist in the matter, since each treatment has to be created in a personalized way for each patient.

Here you will find interesting information about Language acquisition and cognitive development.

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

If you want to read more articles similar to Paragrammatism: definition, examples, symptoms, causes and treatment, we recommend that you enter our category of Neuropsychology.

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