Literal Paraphasia

Synonyms

Fluent segmental paraphasia; Phonemic paraphasia; Phonological substitution

Definition

The Greek prefix “para” means “substitution for” and, when affixed to “-phasia,” came to mean a substitution in speech. “Literal” paraphasia was the term for a substitution of a sound segment developed from early research on aphasia in languages with alphabetic writing systems and before the conceptualization of the “phoneme” at the end of the nineteenth century.

Under many important constraints, one phoneme may substitute for another, and as phonemes are understood as a “set of distinctive features,” there is a metric to evaluate phonemic substitutions in terms of the number of shared features between target and error. A majority of phonemic paraphasias, although not all, involve phonemes that differ in only one feature, and thus one can see that “like substitutes for like”: /p/ → /b/ differing in the feature for voice, /n/ → /m/ differing in the feature for place of articulation, and /t/ →...