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Discourse and Dementia

Dementia is at once a biological, biomedical, clinical, and illness event, but within and across each of these levels, dementia is manifest in talk and text.  Biomedical researchers and clinicians speak and write about dementia in their own argot.  Caregivers and families learn to speak simply and clearly to increasingly forgetful loved ones.  People with the disease are ever searching for words and gestures to ‘make do’ in everyday talk.  In a sense, there are many overlapping ‘discourses’ about dementia, and one of my more passionate interests concerns the discursive event that is dementia.  What are the discursive devices that persons with dementia use to get their meanings across?  How do family members or caregivers help co-construct that meaning?  How do clinicians diagnose a neuropathological process out of spoken questions and answers in an office visit?  The toolkits of discourse and conversation analysis prove eminently useful for dissecting both clinical and everyday talk and text.  Probing these questions has brought me in contact with some very sharp scholars and scientists, and I highlight one of two of our edited volumes (one in print and one on the way).

Schrauf, R514iv2cqsyl-_sx331_bo1204203200_. W., & Muller, N. (2014). Dialogue and Dementia: Cognitive and Communicative Resources for Engagement. New York: Taylor and Francis.

This edited volume takes the positive view that conversation between persons with dementia and their interlocutors is a privileged site for ongoing cognitive engagement. The book aims to identify and describe specific linguistic devices or strategies at the level of turn-by-turn talk that promote and extend conversation, and to explore real-world engagements that reflect these strategies.

Final reflections tie these linguistic strategies and practices to wider issues of the “self” and “agency” in persons with dementia. Thematically, the volume fosters an integrated perspective on communication and cognition in terms of which communicative resources are recognized as cognitive resources, and communicative interaction is treated as reflecting cognitive engagement. This reflects perspectives in cognitive anthropology and cognitive science that regard human cognitive activity as distributed and culturally rooted.

Plejert, C,, Lindholm, C, and Schrauf, RW (2017) Multingual Interactiojacket Image for Multilingual Interaction and Dementian and Dementia. Multilingual Matters.

This book brings together international, linguistic research with a focus on interaction in multilingual encounters involving people with dementia in care and healthcare settings. The methodologies used (Conversation Analysis, Ethnography and Discursive Constructionism) capture practices on the micro-level, revealing how very subtle details may be of critical importance for the everyday well-being of participants with dementia, particularly in settings and contexts where there is a lack of a common verbal language of interlocutors, or where language abilities have been lost as a result of dementia. Chapters analyse the practices and actions employed by interlocutors to facilitate mutual understanding, enhance high-quality social relations and assure optimal care and treatment, in spite of language and cognitive difficulties, with an emphasis put on the participants’ remaining capacities, and what can be achieved between people with dementia and their interlocutors in a collaborative fashion. This book goes beyond the study of two-party communication to address multiparty and group interactions which are common in residential care and other healthcare settings and will be of interest to professionals and policy makers as well as to medical sciences and linguistics researchers and students.

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