Sleep deprivation affects numerous cognitive processes. Children populations have not been studied thoroughly, with regard to the effect of sleep deprivation on communication abilities. In this study, we investigate the pragmatic competence following acute sleep deprivation. Two eleven-year-old boys were evaluated on their pragmatic ability before and following sleep deprivation. The conversations were video-recorded, transcribed and analyzed using the CHAT conventions. The Pragmatic Evaluation Protocol Revised (PREP-R) was administered for the investigation of pragmatic ability. Both children demonstrated a significantly lower performance following acute sleep deprivation. Their specific pragmatic ability and grammatically-based pragmatic ability were impaired. The subjects were unable to use lexical, morphological and syntactic cohesion, and encountered difficulties in the interaction and the managing of pauses. Acute sleep deprivation affects pragmatic competence, mainly due to difficulties in alertness, attention, working memory, and executive dysfunction in general. Variability in the pragmatic ability of the two subjects implies that more studies, focused on the cognitive deficits after sleep deprivation can cast more light on the evaluation of pragmatic ability.
In addition to linguistic impairments, the cognitive underpinnings of pragmatic abilities in aphasic individuals can be severely compromised. Impairments include incoherent discourse and other speech organization deficits. At the same time, preserved pragmatic patterns reveal communicative abilities that can go unnoticed if only standardized screening tests are used. Conversational Partners also appear to play a role in mitigating compromised linguistic ability. Although some tools assessing the communicative abilities of neurological patients have been recently employed, the question of whether pragmatic performance declines in consistent patterns remains poorly understood. We applied the Pragmatic Evaluation Protocol – Revised (PREP-R) to video-recorded interviews of Greek individuals with aphasia, presented here as separate case studies. The tool offers a detailed account of pragmatic ability across 29 distinct categories and consists of three distinct subcomponents, namely enunciative pragmatics, textual pragmatics, and interactional pragmatics. Our results showed considerable variation in the performance of each patient and across our three aphasic patients. We also found that the role of the Key Conversational Partner was critical to effective communication, in line with previous research. As the communication repertoire of each of our participants was found to be highly idiosyncratic, we propose that further research should shift away from the mere evaluation of isolated verbal abilities.
In this paper we analyze the life history of a woman, as told in first person by herself and in third person by her partner, focusing on her worries about body image and how they affect various important aspects of her everyday life through the life cycle. Our materials are the respective biographic interviews to a 33-year-old woman and her partner, a 40-year-old man, where they storied her life paying special attention to body image and dissatisfaction issues. The analysis is structured into six emerging themes along both stories: "The gaze of the other and body exposure", "Pregnancy", "Modifying the body", "Socio-cultural pressure", "Masculine desire", and "The silence dilemma". We pay special attention to changes in positioning, feelings and habits with respect to the body along the life cycle, with key moments in teenage, and before, during and after a pregnancy. The analysis of biographies of non-diagnosed persons may help us understand various ways of positioning in the socio-cultural context of Western culture with respect to the body. At the same time, it may facilitate the development of actions to construct a critical view on context, contributing to women's free elaboration of their identity and body experience.
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