ABSTRACT
Address correspondence to: Max Coltheart, Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney NSW 2109, Australia.
© 2004 Psychology Press Ltd https://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/pp/02687038.html DOI:10.1080/02687030344000526
What are we trying to do when we assess the language abilities of a person who has suffered a brain injury and whom we suspect may have aphasia; and why do we try to do it? Presumably the fundamental aim is to try to decide whether the brain injury has affected the person’s abilities in some domain or domains of language. This aim is conceptually simple: We are notionally just comparing what the person’s language was like prior to the brain injury with what it is like now, after the brain injury. If there are ways in which the language is worse now than it was then, it is reasonable to ascribe that difference to the effects of the brain injury.
