http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/31752197

Aphasia and Linguistic Competence

The theoretical notions of "grammaticalness" (in terms of sentences of a language) and "competence" (the user's knowledge of grammatical sentences of his language) are tested in one aspect: surface ordering of elements in putative English sentences. This paper reports the results of an initial contrastive experiment, with a sequence of studies to follow. An aphasic individual might be expected to perform differently from a normal individual when asked for judgments of "normality" in putative sentences in his native language. A group of normal subjects and a group of aphasic subjects were asked to: (1) select the one which more closely approximates normal English from a pair of strings of randomly distributed English sentence formatives; (2) rank a given string of randomly distributed formatives on a 1-to-5 scale as to its acceptability as normal English. Results show that both normal and aphasic subjects tend to prefer a given string, regardless of its order in the task, and that rank and preference are highly correlated. Where radical differences were expected, few if any were observed, raising the question of the empirical testability of "linguistic competence," and of its involvement in the behavior of both normal and pathological language users. (Author/JD).

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