Pragmatics and Aphasia: A case study
Krystallia Pantsiou1
School of Psychology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Anagennisi Rehabiliation Center, Thessaloniki, Greece
Félix Díaz Martínez1
Department of Psychology, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain
Hariklia Proios1
Department of Educational & Social Policy, University of Macedonia,
Thessaloniki, Greece
1 Anagennisi Rehabiliation Center, Thessaloniki, Greece
Pragmatics is defined as the appropriate use of language either to comprehend ideas or to interact in social situations effectively (Rad, 2014). Three types of knowledge have been introduced as prerequisites for appropriate communication in context: linguistic knowledge, knowledge of objects, events and actions, and social knowledge (Penn, 1999). Three foundational contributions to Pragmatics are Speech Act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), conversational implicature, and relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986).
It is supported that numerous developmental and neurological disorders, such as Down syndrome, autism, strokes, traumatic brain injuries, brain tumors, to mention but a few, display pragmatic deficits. So far, research has shown a plethora of pragmatic deficits in aphasic patients. Typical pragmatic challenges for aphasic patients are modified repair sequences, reduced cohesion and coherence, limited information content, unclear thematic structure and different adaptation processes in dialogue as compared to healthy control subjects (Jeacks & Hielscher-Fastabend, 2010). Numerous researchers claim that communication disorders subsequent to Right Hemisphere Brain Damage affect lexical-semantic processing, prosody, inferencing, discourse organization, and humour (Côté, Payer, Giroux, & Joanette, 2007). Particularly, this research is a case study of an aphasic patient where we assess her pragmatic abilities.
Our main goal was to assess the pragmatic competence of a middle-aged woman who suffers from a left hemispheric stroke with aphasia using the Pragmatic Evaluation Protocol-Revised (PREP-R, in Spanish Protocolo Rápido de Evaluación Pragmática-Revisado; Fernández Urquiza et al, 2015). The PREP-R allows to assess pragmatic efficacy, taking into account the classical linguistic components (phonology, grammar and semantics) in order to determine whether the impairment is mainly pragmatic in a narrow sense (specific pragmatic deficit) or whether the communicative difficulties experienced by the speaker are mainly due to grammatical, semantic or phonological deficits (linguistic-based pragmatic deficit).
The assessment process with the PREP-R is based on a video record of a real time conversation. In this particular situation, the researcher, the patient and her key conversational partner (a familiar person who share a specific conversational network) were present. After recording and transcribing the video, the specific features of patient’s communicative abilities were rated with the PREP-R in three areas: a) enunciative pragmatics 10/16 b) textual pragmatics 3/7 and c) interactional pragmatics 3/7.The analysis of the transcript shows numerous pragmatic deficits. Nonetheless, these deficits are mostly referred to the linguistic-based dimension. These findings promote the need for further investigation with regard to aphasia and pragmatic efficacy.
References
Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things With Words. New York: Oxford University Press.
Côté, H., Payer, M., Giroux, F., & Joanette, Y. (2007). Towards a description of clinical communication impairment profiles following right hemisphere damage. Aphasiology, 21, 739-749.
Fernández Urquiza, Maite, Díaz Martínez, Félix, Moreno Campos, Verónica, Lázaro López-Villaseñor, Miguel, & Simón López, Teresa (2015). Protocolo Rápido de Evaluación Pragmática Revisado. Valencia: Guada Impresores.
Jeacks, P., & Hielscher-Fastabend, M. (2010). Pragmatics and Aphasia. Sprache, Stimme, Gehӧr, 34(2), 58-62.
Penn, C. (1999). Pragmatic assessment and therapy for persons with brain damage: what have clinicians gleaned in two decades? Brain Language, 68(3), 535-552.
Rad, D. S. (2014). A review on adult pragmatic assessments. Iran Journal of Neurology, 13(3), 113-118.
Searle, J. (1969) Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre (1986). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Keywords:
Stroke,
Aphasia,
pragmatics,
key conversational partner,
Pragmatic efficacy
Conference:
54th Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting, Llandudno, United Kingdom, 16 Oct - 18 Oct, 2016.
Presentation Type:
Keynote presentation
Topic:
Student Submissions
Citation:
Pantsiou
K
(2016). Pragmatics and Aphasia: A case study.
Front. Psychol.
Conference Abstract:
54th Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2016.68.00072
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Received:
27 Apr 2016;
Published Online:
15 Aug 2016.
*
Correspondence:
MD. Krystallia Pantsiou, Psychologist, Thessaloniki, Greece, kristi_pant@yahoo.gr