Language was analysed into four arbitrarily selected linguistic operations. These operations, seriation, cross-modal coding, immediate memory and cue matching, were translated into visual forms and presented as four tasks. If these tasks were solved by a subject it could be assumed that he understood the basis of linguistic operations whether he could speak or not. Aphasics and the deaf learned the tasks, thus establishing their competence with linguistic operations. Speaking psychotic children failed some of the tasks and speechless psychotic children failed all tasks. Immediate memory discriminated speaking and speechless groups, failure in seriation characterised psychotics but not imbeciles.
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