Psycholinguistic Development: Functioning and Dysfunctioning

Abstract

Language, viewed as it must be for the practical evaluation of problems in human communication, consists of holistic acts that involve complex, interconnected operations and determinants— physical, perceptual, cognitive, emotional and social, as well as linguistic. They are subjective acts to the extent that their meanings derive from the individual’s interpretations of inner and outer experience and from their communal validity which is a matter of degree from person to person and situation to situation. They are objective acts in that they utilize a code with conventional referents and rules of grammar. Thus, in making judgments about aberrations of human communication, their primary and secondary components and systemic effects, one must consider all of their aspects interactively, from both the standpoint of the patient’s phenomenological world and the standpoint of the congruence or incongruence of his acts with the shared rules and practice of communication in his particular community. When the patient is a child, one must consider one other, highly complicating factor—the patient is somewhere along the road of developing the mechanisms of communication and of learning its conventions from his immediate and extended community.