Is pathological development part of normal cognitive neuropsychology?—A rejoinder to marcel

Abstract

The paper to which Marcel is replying can be summarised rather briefly. We report the case of a boy (TA) who, despite gross global cognitive impairment, reads and writes Italian extremely well (at the level of bidirectional speech/print transcoding). Marcel can find no flaw with our basic methology, and hence no fault with our data per se. The arguments at issue concern solely the theoretical interpretation of such findings, and we shall accordingly follow Marcel to this high ground. Our report was intended as a case-study in both senses of that term: n = 1, and a set of assumptions about how to relate developmental deficits to normal cognitive architectures. In wanting to reject this particular study, Marcel well realises that he is attacking an entire research paradigm. If our bambino is thrown out with Marcel's bathwater, then a lot of other people's babies will follow the same route. This is admittedly no defence to Marcel's critique, but one should keep in mind the scope of his attack. The principal thrust of Marcel's argument is that our data are just not relevant to the proto-theory we espouse; a subsidiary claim is that the theory itself is underdeveloped. Although these points are, of course, inter-related, we shall initially take them separately.