Linguistics An Introduction

The study of syntactic errors in language-disordered patients is an area in which linguists, psychologists and speech therapists have collaborated extensively. Recent syntactic theories have been applied to neurolinguistic data and have led to a better understanding of patients' linguistic problems; in turn, theoretical linguists have gained a new source of data from syntactic errors to test their theories.

Generative linguists in particular have shown interest in syntactic disorders. Recall that many generative linguists (particularly Noam Chomsky and his followers) claim that humans possess a language-specific cognitive system (embodying principles of Universal Grammar) that underlies the production and comprehension of sentences. Syntactic principles are said to be unique to language, and autonomous of non-linguistic cognitive systems such as vision, hearing, reasoning, or memory (see the introduction, p. 11). This view of syntax makes two interesting predictions about language disorders. Firstly, we would expect to find cases of language disorders in which knowledge of syntax is impaired while other cognitive systems remain unaffected: if the syntactic system is indeed autonomous, then it should be possible for it to be selectively impaired, for example as a result of brain lesions or genetic deficits. The second prediction is that syntactic disorders should involve impairments of both language production and language comprehension. If the linguistic view is correct, and there is indeed only one underlying system of syntactic principles which is crucially involved in both sentence production and sentence comprehension, then an impairment of the underlying system should manifest itself not only in sentence production but also in sentence comprehension and in grammaticality judgement tasks.