Jumping to Conclusions: “Language Loss” Versus “Language Impairment”

This paper discusses the impact of different metaphors of language dysfunction, with particular notice taken of the contribution of Marshall's work. This is especially the case regarding the notable paper on semantic error patterns (Marshall and Newcombe, 1973), and his later commentary on Chomsky's Rules and Representations(1980) with his elaboration of the conceptual commitments of The New Organology(1980). Examples of language performance provided by two sets of studies are used to illustrate the view that talk of language “loss” is hard to differentiate from the effects of concomitant processing mechanisms such as working memory. These examples are taken from studies of English and Turkish dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) patients (March, 2004), and temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients (Field, 2001). Much contemporary neuropsychological research seems focussed on issues which assume that we already know how to describe the behaviours and processes we are interested in, and thus we can now concentrate on how and where in the brain these processes are handled. This perspective is examined from the points of view both that we do not yet have a sufficiently precise application of descriptions which utilise Linguistic constructs, and also that the available models of such processes as memory do not yet allow us to interpret task effects independently of the theoretician's intuitions.