Peach R.K., Shapiro L.P. Cognition and acquired language disorders

St. Louis, MO: Elsevier Mosby, 2012. — 357 p. — ISBN: 978-0-323-07201-4.Clinical practice associated with acquired language disorders has evolved in important ways in the past 30 years as a result of advances in our understanding of the cognition of language. In 1982, the Committee on Language of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) defined language as a rule-governed behavior that can be described by at least five parameters — phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic — for which “learning and use are determined by the interaction of biological, cognitive, psychosocial, and environmental factors” (ASHA, 1983). The separation of language and cognition in this definition was reinforced in a subsequent report by a subgroup of the same committee (the Subcommittee on Language and Cognition) to address the roles of the speech-language pathologist in the habilitation and rehabilitation of cognitively impaired individuals (ASHA, 1987). In that report, cognition was described, using Neisser’s (1967) definition, as “the processes by which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used” and was considered separately from language. In portraying “cognitive-language relationships,” the report went on to list the “specific cognitive impairments that may affect language” by contributing “to deficits in the semantic, syntactic, phonological, and/or pragmatic aspects of language.” The independence of the communication problems arising from these “cognitive” deficits from other types of language disorders was emphasized and thus gave rise to the category of so-called cognitive-communication impairments. Cognitive-communication impairments were defined as “communicative disorders that result from deficits in linguistic and nonlinguistic cognitive processes” (p. 54). The distinction between cognitive-communication and language disorders was further highlighted in the scope of practice for speech-language pathology (ASHA, 1990) with statements partitioning the practice for language versus cognitive-communication disorders. These distinctions continue to be upheld in more recent updates of these clinical practice documents (ASHA, 2003, 2005, 2007). The descriptor cognitive-communication impairments has evolved in some quarters into the even more problematic term cognitive-linguistic deficits.