Ictal paraphasia induced by language activity.

Four patients with ictal speech disturbance were studied. Their seizures featured isolated, or series of, brief episodes of fluent paraphasia, paragraphia, and comprehension deficit. These episodes were often induced by language activity. Six patients with ictal paraphasia or paragraphia, as a recurrent habitual seizure, are reported in the literature. All ten cases, including the four cases described here and the six cases reported in the literature, featured patients who uttered meaningless speech fluently or displayed paragraphia. The syllables uttered during seizures contained many neologisms and resembled the neologistic jargon of patients with fluent aphasias of the Wernicke type. Nine patients had clusters or status of brief seizures and four patients had auditory hallucination as an ictal event. The seizures in six patients were easily induced by the use of language. Seizure focus was on the left side in all patients mentioned. The possibility of another type of language-induced seizures than those seen in reading epilepsy or language-induced epilepsy is suggested in which myoclonias of the jaw and face, or upper extremities are the main seizure types.