Blurb:

Many acquired neurogenic disorders have implications for accurate speech production. Some of these affect motor planning and motor execution (see Code and Ball, 1988), others have an impact on higher levels of speech organization. Speech problems associated with various types of aphasia have been the focus of sonority-based analyses for some time. Studies have included, for example, Christman’s work on sonority and neologistic jargon (1992a, b), and Code and Ball’s study of recurrent utterances (1994).














In this chapter, we examine a range of data from aphasia and aphasia-like disorders. These include lexical and nonlexical recurrent utterances (or speech automatisms) in English, German and Chinese; patterns of gradual speech loss in progressive speech deterioration, and two cases of what Alajouanine (1956) and Perecman and Brown’s (1985) would term undifferentiated or phonemic jargon, respectively. For all these cases we described where sonority does, and does not, seem to explain the data, and speculate on whether sonority is hard-wired into the brain.