Word salad
confused unintelligible jumble of words and phrases From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Word salad is language with meaningless, scrambled words. It is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases".[1]
'Word salad' is most often used for a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The words may or may not be grammatically correct. The key thing is that a listener cannot get any meaning from them. The term is often used in psychiatry and theoretical linguistics to describe language which native speakers judge is meaningless.
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In mental health diagnoses
Word salad occurs in neurological or psychological cases in which a person tries to communicate, and words and phrases come out – but make no sense. Often, the person is unaware that they did not make sense. It appears in people with dementia and schizophrenia,[2] and after anoxic brain injury.
It may be present as:
- Receptive aphasia: damage to brain centres dealing with language.[3]
- Schizophasia: incoherent babbling, sometimes a symptom of schizophrenia.
- Logorrhea: a mental condition characterized by excessive talking.
- Graphorrhea: a written version of word salad, rarer than logorrhea in schizophrenics.[4]
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In computing
Word salad can be generated by a computer program for various purposes.[5]
Mojibake, also called Buchstabensalat ("letter salad") in German, is an effect similar to word salad, in which an assortment of seemingly-random text is generated.
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References
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