Neurolinguistic analysis of recurrent utterance in aphasia.

A linguistic analysis of 97 recurrent utterances (RUs) is reported which delineates 2 separate types of RU - Real Word Recurrent Utterances (RWRUs) and Non-Meaningful Recurrent Utterances (NMRUs). The range, frequency and distribution of phonemes occurring in RUs is similar to normal English in RWRUs, but not in NMRUs. NMRUs do not break the phonotactic constraints of the language and RWRUs rarely break the syntactic rules. It appears to be possible to classify RWRUs into certain groups among which a Pronoun + Verb and an Expletive group are the most interesting. Expletive RUs were all produced by male subjects and Pronoun + Verb RUs deserve further investigation. Implications for rehabilitation are discussed.