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Abstract
Aphasia has been characterized as the loss of aptitude for metalinguistic operations. This article analyses the metasyntactic deficits in a case of early-adolescent dysphasia in terms of a psycholinguistic model of metalinguistic development, and characterizes the metasyntactic deficit according to the level of metalinguistic representation achieved and the type of processing invoked. The results suggest that aphasia can differentially affect syntactic and metasyntactic competence. They also suggest that the psycholinguistic model permits a systematic description of the nature and the significance of the metasyntactic deficit by specifying the level at which metasyntactic knowledge is impaired, and by providing a precise analysis of the representational status of metalinguistic awareness for a given linguistic structure. The model permits the definition of a hierarchy of difficulty among metasyntactic tasks by systematically defining the level of knowledge which each might recruit. It is suggested that a systematic analysis of the representational status of a linguistic structure such as the one conducted in this study permits an efficient planning of remediation by selecting therapy targets and therapy tasks.