"Paraphasia refers to the production of unintended syllables, words, or phrases during the effort to speak" (Goodglass & Kaplan, 1983, p. 8). Patients with fluent forms of aphasia exhibit many more paraphasias than do those with nonfluent types. There are three types of paraphasias, literal/phonological, neologistic, and semantic/verbal.

Literal/phonological paraphasia - More than half of the intended word is produced correctly. For example, a patient may say /pun/ instead of /spun/. In addition, transpositions of sounds can occur, e.g tevilision for television. (Brookshire, 1997).

Neologistic paraphasias - Less than half of the intended word is produced correctly. In some cases the entire word is produced incorrectly. Neologisms are also common in the speech of schizophrenics.

Verbal paraphasias are those in which another word is substituted for the target word. (The substitution must be a real word. If it is not, the paraphasia is classified as neologistic.)