2023/01/01 by Olga Ivanova, Emma Machado de Souza, Soraya Méndez Sanz +1 · 1 voice
Neuroscience · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism #Developmental and Educational Neuropsychology #Public Health and Social Inequalities
paper · pdf · doi:10.25267/pragmalinguistica.2023.i31.09
openalex publication_date 2023/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Impaired pragmatic competence is part of the primary symptomatology of many clinical conditions linked to neurodevelopment (e.g. autism spectrum disorder), acquired disorders (e.g. right hemisphere lesions) or neurodegenerative diseases (e.g. frontotemporal dementia). It is also not uncommon to record its secondary impairment, derived from alterations of other linguistic levels, such as the lexical-semantic level (e.g. Alzheimer’s disease). The study of such impairment faces, however, a number of challenges on both theoretical level (what is meant by units of pragmatic analysis) and methodological level (how to study such units and assess their degree of impairment). The aim of this paper is to offer a critical perspective on the main challenges in the study of pragmatic competence in neurodegenerative diseases, specifically in Alzheimer’s disease, focusing on the following three: the variability of theoretical approaches, the variability of methodological approaches, and the masking role of compensatory strategies.