Onomatolalia

Onomatolalia (from the Greek words onoma, onomatos - "name, word" and lalia - "speech, chatter") is a speech disorder in which a person constantly repeats syllables, words or phrases.

This disease belongs to the group of speech and language disorders. It is characterized by the uncontrolled, involuntary repetition of sounds, syllables or words in speech without any intention on the part of the person.

The causes of onomatolalia can be different: brain damage due to traumatic brain injury, stroke, brain tumor, neurological diseases (Parkinson's disease, Huntington's chorea), mental disorders. Sometimes onomatolalia occurs as a side effect when taking certain medications.

To treat onomatolalia, drug therapy, speech therapy sessions, and psychotherapy are used. The prognosis depends on the cause of the disease and the age of the patient. With timely treatment, symptoms may significantly decrease or disappear.

Onomatolacy as a psychotherapeutic method

Onomatolasia is the involuntary repetition of elements of one's own voice instead of substitute words. Those. This is a distortion of the process of naming a word, in which the subject, at the moment of pronouncing the word, replaces it with a functionally similar sound combination based on the non-verbal context.

This non-speech phenomenon, along with echolalia (reflected speech, in which the repetition of words called into speech by an earlier word replaces the word itself), is a form of speech agrammatism. According to the theory of M. Rimstein and R. Axelrod, as a result of neurotic blockade of voluntary speech function, an organic record of pathological connections arises, which has a harmful effect on the psychopathological process during its development and complicates its course. From this point of view, onomatolosis in a broad sense can be considered as a type of reflection that means a violation of the generic and specific laws of the associative process due to neurosis of the voluntary control function of the cerebral cortex. Therefore, onomatology is not the primary symptom of the disease, but only a reflection of the latter. This is an affective-expressive way of reproducing activity factors that are unconscious to the patient. It is explained as a pathological symptom, which sometimes only reflects the significance of certain links in the structure of mental activity that form an unconscious neurosis. A specific form of compensation for primary inadequate neurotic disorders