Advances in experimental psychopatholinguistics: What can we learn from simulation of disorder-like symptoms in human volunteers?

For more than a century, work on patients with acquired or developmental language disorders has informed psycholinguistic models of normal linguistic processing in healthy persons. On the other hand, such models of healthy language processing have been used as blue-prints to gain further insights into the impairments of patients with language pathologies. Against the exemplary background of language production, the first part of this paper reflects this relationship and formulates a desideratum for naturalistic albeit controlled experimental settings. Two recent examples of behavioural and neurofunctional research are presented in which aphasia-like speech symptoms were elicited in healthy control subjects. In the second part, this idea to investigate disorder-like symptoms which are being experimentally induced for the course of the study is further pursued in the field of reading and dyslexia research. Here, it is argued, again on the basis of behavioural and neurofunctional data, that such an approach is advantageous in at least two respects: 1. It allows a much more stringent control of experimental factors and confounds than could be potentially achieved in a clinical setting. 2. It allows in-extenso piloting of experiments with healthy volunteers before actually recruiting selected (and sometimes rare) patients. It will be concluded that the experimental simulation of disorder-like symptoms in easily accessible healthy volunteers may be a useful approach to understand novel aspects of a language disorder on the basis of a human neurocognitive model of this disorder.