Acoustic properties of pathologic reiterative utterances: a case study of palilalia

Acoustic analyses of the reiterative utterances of one subject demonstrate a high degree of similarity among the members of a repetition train. The acoustic data did not confirm for this patient the published description of palilalia as a reiteration of utterances in a context of increasing rate and decreasing loudness. In fact, the final utterance in a repetition train often had either a longer duration, greater intensity, or more pronounced fundamental frequency change (or any combination of these) than its predecessors. It is suggested that these may be more than one type of pathological reiterative utterance.