ICTAL SPEECH AUTOMATISMS AND SWEARING

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Speech characterized by a high degree of automaticity and stereotypy might be likely to demonstrate independence from auditory feedback monitoring mechanisms. The speech generated by patients during psychomotor seizures (ictal speech automatisms) has these characteristics, and the effects of delayed auditory feedback (DAF) on the speech of a patient with psychomotor seizures, both during and after seizure activity were studied. Focal seizures were precipitated on 2 occasions in the course of studying 1 patient. In both instances speech samples were obtained under DAF conditions during and after the seizure. Speech generated during the seizure either failed to show any of the effects of DAF, or showed these effects to a lesser extent than in the post-ictal testing period. The effects of DAF on spontaneous swearing were observed during the post-ictal testing period. Utterances of the word "damn" showed no DAF effects, despite the fact that these utterances were interspersed between propositional statements that showed marked DAF effects. There are apparently circumstances under which speech can be generated without auditory feedback monitoring.