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Background: Human communication occurs through both verbal and visual/motoric modalities. Simultaneous conversational speech and gesture occurs across all cultures and age groups. When verbal communication is compromised, more of the communicative load can be transferred to the gesture modality. Although people with aphasia produce meaning-laden gestures, the communicative value of these has not been adequately investigated. Aims: To investigate the communicative effectiveness of pantomime gesture produced spontaneously by individuals with aphasia during conversational discourse. Methods & Procedures:Sixty-seven undergraduate students wrote down the messages conveyed by 11 people with aphasia that produced pantomime while engaged in conversational discourse. Students were presented with a speech-only, a gesture-only and a combined speech and gesture condition and guessed messages in both a free description and a multiple-choice task. Outcomes & Results:As hypothesized, listener comprehension was more accurate in the combined pantomime gesture and speech condition as compared with the gesture-or speech-only conditions. Participants achieved greater accuracy in the multiple-choice task as compared with the free-description task, but only in the gestureonly condition. The communicative effectiveness of the pantomime gestures increased as the fluency of the participants with aphasia decreased. Conclusions & Implications:These results indicate that when pantomime gesture was presented with aphasic speech, the combination had strong communicative effectiveness. Future studies could investigate how pantomimes can be integrated into interventions for people with aphasia, particularly emphasizing elicitation of pantomimes in as natural a context as possible and highlighting the opportunity for efficient message repair.

Social isolation is a key concern for individuals with dementia in long-term care. A possible solution is to promote social interaction between residents. A first step toward facilitating positive relationships between residents with dementia is to understand the mechanisms behind their interactions with each other, and also how their relationships with each other are built through such interactions. Drawing on casual conversations between residents in a special care unit for dementia, this paper uses systemic functional linguistics to examine how people with dementia use language to enact and construct their role-relations with each other. Results suggest people with dementia are able and willing conversationalists. However, factors such as the extent of communication breakdown and compatibility of the interlocutors may influence whether positive relations develop or not. Casual conversation is suggested to be a promising activity to encourage positive interpersonal processes between individuals with dementia in residential care.

Social isolation in dementia is a growing concern as the incidence and prevalence of dementing conditions is on the rise in many societies. Positive social interactions, which foster the construction and enactment of positive interpersonal relationships and therefore positive discursive identities, make an important contribution to emotional well-being. In this article, we investigate how two women diagnosed with dementia of the Alzheimer's type use language to relate to each other and two visiting graduate students. We use Systemic Functional Linguistics as an analytical framework, specifically investigating the use of vocatives and naming, and conversational moves and exchanges.

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