Acoustic Features of Palilalia: A Case Study

John Van Borsel, Charlotte Bontinck, Marleen Corijn, Frank Paemeleire and Pieter Vandemaele

While a number of authors have suggested that patients with palilalia typically show a tendency to repeat words or phrases with an increasing rate, others maintain that an accelerating speech rate is not essential and that in some patients the rate of delivery remains constant throughout the palilalia. The present paper reports the results of an instrumental analysis of the durational variability in the reiterations of a 60-year-old man with palilalia. The variations in the reiterations suggest that novel or varying motor processes are deployed to produce the elements in a sequence rather than an invariant motor program.