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Brain injury X sympton: a question on causality

This paper aims at discussing the organicist proposal concerning aphasia. According to such a proposal, there is a direct causal relation between an impaired brain and linguistic symptoms. I depart from and take into account the fact that language is governed by laws intrinsec/inherent to the functoning of language. This is to say that language cannot be governed by laws of any other theoretical domain. As a speech therapist and linguist, who is constantly face to face with the problematic status of the aphasic symptons, I claim that the classical causal relation mentioned above ought to be revisited. In this direction, I follow Freud (1891) who put forward Jackson’s hypothesis that the relation between lesion-linguistic symptom was not straight (Freud, 1874).

Aphasia; Impaired Brain and Linguistic Symptons; Language and Aphasia; Language Functioning and Brain Functioning


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