ABSTRACT

T he notion o f ‘strategy’ has been applied broadly to such differ­ e n t research areas as problem -solving, read ing com prehension and second language acquisition (Faerch & Kasper, 1983a; Newell & Sim on, 1972; S ternberg & Powell, 1983; Van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). O ne o f the m otivations for investigating strategic behav­ iou r has been to gain insights in to the psychological processes underly ing such verbal (or non-verbal) behaviour. However, con­ cep tions and defin itions o f strategies and criteria for th e ir classifi­ cation have been criticized on various g rounds (e.g., K ellerm an, 1991; O xford e t al., 1992), one o f which perta ins to the lack of psychological plausibility o f p roposed strategies in term s o f the ir com patibility with language p rod u c tio n , cognitive and p rob lem ­ solving processes (K ellerm an, 1991, p. 145). O n e possible way o f throw ing light on the psychological processes underly ing stra­ tegic behaviour is to investigate the verbal o u tp u t o f languageim paired individuals relative to norm als. T he goal o f this chap te r is thus to investigate the n a tu re o f the verbalizations p ro d u ced by language-im paired patien ts in an a ttem pt to in fer the strategic behaviour underly ing the verbalizations and to re la te them to processing m echanism s. T h e investigation is based on a review o f specific studies with illustrative references, and focuses on verbal p roductions. A lthough such an endeavour may provide useful insights, o u r approach is subject to various lim itations due to the particu larities o f the popu la tion investigated. H ence, we shall first discuss the types o f pa tien t investigated an d the difficulties one should antic ipate w hen dealing with language-im paired ind i­ viduals.