Friday, July 28, 2017

Testing Trump’s Competence: Language and Cognition

As the linguist said to the psychologist…
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Linguist: His language skill has plummeted, he cannot stay on subject, or complete sentences, he repeats himself, he’s incoherent, he has simplistic vocabulary and tangled grammar.
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Psychologist: It could be stress, or anger, or fatigue.
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Linguist: Other leaders can cope, he can’t.
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A me... speak... problem?
Psychologist: Maybe he speaks this way to appeal to his supporters who also talk like that.
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Linguist: But he can’t adjust his unscripted speaking style to suit the listener. He only has one style. You talk at a rally, maybe you choose to go incoherently emotive. You face an intellectual adversary, you switch to cerebral suasion. He can’t do that anymore.
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Psychologist: Are you suggesting he is suffering from some cognitive disability? To determine that, you need to administer a psychological test to get data. He won’t submit to that.
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Linguist: To a linguist, the data is there. Just parsing his speech suggests a serious prognosis.
____________
Voice-over
Apparently he wasn’t always so linguistically disabled. In the 1980s and 1990s, he could give coherent interviews. Now, linguistic evidence suggests Trump is a severely linguistically and cognitively crippled leader. Political office demands coherent communication and crystal clear cognition. He doesn’t demonstrate this.
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