Cognitive Aspects of Pragmatic Disorders

Cummings, Louise

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-47489-2_22

Cited by 18 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 124 publications

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“…In other words, pragmatic language skills seem closely intertwined with ToM abilities. There exists a broad literature on the presence of ToM deficits in several clinical populations with manifest pragmatic impairments (for an overview, see e.g., Cummings, 2017). More specifically, numerous studies illustrated ToM impairments in psychosis (Bora et al, 2009a(Bora et al, , 2009bBrüne and Bodenstein, 2005;Harrington et al, 2005;Sprong et al, 2007) and demonstrated an association of ToM-deficiencies with pragmatic language deficits in this population (Champagne-Lavau and Stip, 2010;Langdon et al, 2002b;Mazza et al, 2008).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patients with psychosis struggle with scalar implicatures

Wampers

Schrauwen

Hert

et al. 2018

Schizophrenia Research

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Pragmatic language difficulties in people with psychosis have been demonstrated repeatedly but one of the most studied types of pragmatic language, i.e. scalar implicatures (SIs), has not yet been examined in this population. SIs are a special kind of pragmatic inferences, based on linguistic expressions like some, or, must. Such expressions are part of a scale of informativeness organized by informativity (e.g. some/many/all). Although semantically the less informative expressions imply the more informative ones, pragmatically people generally infer that the use of a less informative expression implies that the more informative option is not applicable. Based on the pragmatic language difficulties of people with psychosis we hypothesized that they may be less likely to derive these pragmatic SIs. We conducted two studies in which the ability of people with psychosis to derive SIs was compared to that of healthy controls matched for age and educational level. In the second study we additionally explored the possible link between the capacity to derive SIs and theory of mind (ToM) ability. In general, people with psychosis were less likely to derive SIs than controls. However, the patient group was not homogeneous: half had problems deriving SIs, the other half did not. This dichotomization seems linked to ToM ability because in the patient group, better ToM was associated with a higher ability to derive SIs. Based on the nature of the stimuli used in the SI-task we speculate that this link may not be a direct but an indirect one.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patients with psychosis struggle with scalar implicatures

Wampers

Schrauwen

Hert

et al. 2018

Schizophrenia Research

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“…A wide body of literature has shown in recent decades that traumatic brain injury (TBI) may result, among other things, in communicative-pragmatic impairment (Cummings, 2017;Finch, French, Ou & Fleming, 2016;Galetto, Andreetta, Zettin & Marini, 2013;Key-Delyria, 2016;Marini, Zettin, Bencich, Bosco & Galetto, 2017;Murphy, Huang, Montgomery & Turkstra 2015;Rigon, Voss, Turkstra, Mutlu & Duff, 2016). Non-verbal or extralinguistic ability, i.e., the capacity to communicate with another person through gestures, facial expressions and body posture, is also impaired (Bara, Cutica & Tirassa, 2001; Rousseaux, Kozlowski, 2010;Turkstra et al, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do executive function and theory of mind predict pragmatic abilities following traumatic brain injury? An analysis of sincere, deceitful and ironic communicative acts

Bosco

Gabbatore

Angeleri

et al. 2018

Journal of Communication Disorders

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Quality of life and social integration are strongly influenced by the ability to communicate and previous research has shown that pragmatic ability can be specifically impaired in individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI). In addition, TBI usually results in damage to the frontotemporal lobes with a consequent impairment of cognitive functions, i.e., attention, memory, executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM). The role of the underlying cognitive deficits in determining the communicative-pragmatic difficulties of an individual with TBI is not yet completely clear. This study examined the relationship between the ability to understand and produce various kinds of communicative acts, (i.e., sincere, deceitful and ironic) and the above-mentioned cognitive and ToM abilities following TBI. Thirty-five individuals with TBI and thirty-five healthy controls were given tasks assessing their ability to comprehend and produce sincere, deceitful and ironic communicative acts belonging to the linguistic and extralinguistic scales of the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo), together with a series of EF and ToM tasks. The results showed that, when compared to healthy individuals, participants with TBI performed poorly overall in the comprehension and production of all the pragmatic phenomena investigated, (i.e., sincere, deceitful and ironic communicative acts), and they also exhibited impaired performance at the level of all the cognitive functions examined. Individuals with TBI also showed a decreasing trend in performance in dealing with sincere, deceitful and ironic communicative acts, on both the comprehension and production subscales of the linguistic and extralinguistic scales. Furthermore, a hierarchical regression analysis revealed that - in patients with TBI but not in the controls - EF had a significant effect on the comprehension of linguistic and extralinguistic irony only, while the percentage of explained variance increased with the inclusion of theory of mind. Indeed, ToM had a significant role in determining patients' performance in the extralinguistic production of sincere and deceitful communicative acts, linguistic and extralinguistic comprehension of deceit and the linguistic production of irony. However, with regard to the performance of patients with TBI in the various pragmatic tasks investigated, (i.e., sincere, deceitful and ironic communicative acts), EF was able to explain the pattern of patients' scores in the linguistic and extralinguistic comprehension but not in production ability. Furthermore, ToM seemed not to be able to explain the decreasing trend in the performance of patients in managing the various kinds of communicative acts investigated.

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“…Such abilities are chiefly the function of cognition and development of pragmatics. Cummings [27] demonstrated that the relationship between cognition and pragmatics is bidirectional in the aspect that the multidiscipline root of pragmatics should firstly include cognitive root as a basic and most important root (beside philosophy, sociology, linguistic and neurology). On the other hand cognitive examination should incorporate utterance explanation and beliefs of fixation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%