A Social Cultural-Approach to Aphasia: Contributions from the Work Developed at a Center for Aphasic Subjects

Contributions of Linguistics to the Study of Aphasias: Focus on Discursive Approaches

“…As models, they are acceptable and may give indices of how some aspects of language have been impaired due to a brain lesion, but they cannot be directly related to the language complexity in its social and concrete use. As Bakhtin argued, if someone attempts to use a model to represent the "whole" of language functioning, such enterprise would be "science fiction" [18,23,35].…”

“…Coudry provided an inventory of metalinguistic tasks that usually compound the language assessment batteries, which involve isolated linguistic units as phonemes, words, sentences, letters, syllables, and the like; as we can see in the following summary: repetition of phonemes or monosyllabic words (after the investigator or from a printed list); repetition of logatomes (non-words in the language, but which follow its phonological pattern); spelling and repetition of words; discrimination between minimal pairs; forming words from initial phonemes; naming objects orally or by written form; identifying an object among others in pictures; making lists following a particular order (months of the year, days of the week, etc); checking verbal fluency (through lists of names; animals, flowers or any other category within the time lapse of one minute); defining words given by the examiner; describing a picture; understanding simple or compound sentences; explaining proverbs; reading aloud (words, sentences or paragraphs); copying words or sentences; writing under dictation; etc. [15,35].…”

“…Despite the statistical correlations established by empirical studies, the author emphasizes that, for certain purposes, the tests could serve to the typological diagnosis, but "only for the diagnosis". A symptom or a group of symptoms allows a classification but does not explain the underlying processes of a phenomenon and, even more important, does not provide clues for the reorganization of language, as meaningful and contextualized activities [15,35]. These claims are bounded up with a dynamic concept of language.…”

“…The score is established by the number of words produced by the individual, irrespective of whether the utterances are or not understandable and/or comprehended by an interlocutor. Such methodological approaches have been of concern to DN and been criticized since the inaugural work of Coudry [12,13,25,33,35,37]. As for the (non-)fluency classification to aphasia, we have claimed that, as argued by Scarpa [38,39], fluency is a myth; an abstract concept, usually compared to the written and finished form of a text or to the production of an "ideal subject".…”

Discurso delirante na esquizofrenia e o efeito de estranhamento

“…Parte das pesquisas realizadas no campo das ciências humanas tem como objeto de estudo o homem e, de acordo com Freitas (2010), isso pressupõe que o pesquisador parta de uma relação entre sujeitos, diferente da relação sujeito -objeto, predominante nas pesquisas das ciências naturais. O foco de uma pesquisa qualitativa está nos processos que constituem determinado fenômeno e, dessa forma, a constatação de que algo está acontecendo constitui apenas o ponto de partida para o pesquisador (NOVAES- PINTO, 2012PINTO, , 2014.…”