“Imagine trying to speak but only being able to produce fragments: "one eye – eye is always – tears – been teary – I can't – I could earlier." Or imagine speaking fluently but creating bizarre "sentence monsters" like: "Well, all I know is, somebody is clipping the kreples and some wha, someone here on the kureping arm." These aren't made-up examples—they're actual utterances from people whose brains have been damaged by stroke, revealing something profound about how our minds construct language.

In the late 1800s, many scientists viewed language simply as a collection of words stored in different parts of the brain—like a mental dictionary with separate sections for hearing words and speaking them. But some clinicians noticed something peculiar: certain patients could remember words quite well but couldn't string them together properly while speaking.

In the 1870s, German physician Adolf Kussmaul was among the first to systematically study these sentence-level problems. He identified patients who spoke in halting, telegraphic fragments lacking many connecting words, termed “agrammatism,” and others who produced flashes of complex syntax but with a tangled organization, so-called “confused sentence monsters,” today’s “paragrammatism.””

Continue reading: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/wired-for-words/202509/telegrams-and-sentence-monsters