MOSAICS FALL APART IN DIFFERENT WAYS: EXPLORING VARIATION IN COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN PATTERNS IN THREE APHASIC PATIENTS

Abstract

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.