Word salad

A word salad is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases",^[1] most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The name schizophasia is used in particular to describe the confused language that may be evident in schizophrenia.^[2] The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but they are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them. The term is often used in psychiatry as well as in theoretical linguistics to describe a type of grammatical acceptability judgement by native speakers.

Psychiatry

Word salad may describe a symptom of neurological or psychiatric conditions in which a person attempts to communicate an idea, but words and phrases that may appear to be random and unrelated come out in an incoherent sequence instead. Often, the person is unaware that they did not make sense. It appears in people with dementia and schizophrenia,^[3] as well as after anoxic brain injury. In schizophrenia, it is called schizophasia.^[2] Clang associations are especially characteristic of mania, as seen in bipolar disorder, as a somewhat more severe variation of flight of ideas. In extreme mania, the patient's speech may become incoherent, with associations markedly loosened, thus presenting as a veritable word salad.

It may be present as:

Clanging, a speech pattern that follows rhyming and other sound associations rather than meaning
Graphorrhea, a written version of word salad that is more rarely seen than logorrhea in people with schizophrenia^[4]
Logorrhea, a mental condition characterized by excessive talking (incoherent and compulsive)
Receptive aphasia,^[5] fluent in speech but without making sense, often a result of a stroke or other brain injury

References

^ "Definition of "word salad". Oxford University Press. 2012. Archived from the original on November 4, 2013.
^ ^a ^b "Medical Definition of SCHIZOPHASIA". www.merriam-webster.com. Retrieved 29 December 2019.
^ Shives, Louise Rebraca (2008). Basic concepts of psychiatric-mental health nursing. Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer / Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. p. 112. ISBN 978-0-7817-9707-8.
^ Geschwind, Norman (1974). Selected papers on language and the brain (2. print. ed.). Dordrecht; Boston: Reidel. p. 80. ISBN 9789027702623.
^ "Merck Manual". merckmanuals.com. Merck Publishing. Retrieved 6 December 2014.