Pragmatic function impairment and Alzheimer’s dementia

Abstract

Pragmatic competence includes the capacity to express illocutionary force and successfully achieve perlocutionary effects, in order to guarantee fully functional communication exchanges. Alzheimer’s Disease is characterized by a constellation of limitations derived from progressive cognitive impairment, which is usually viewed as a global uniform phenomenon. In this paper it is argued that looking independently at the loss and recovery of pragmatic function related to illocutionary and perlocutionary abilities can be a productive way of understanding the progressive deterioration of communicative capacities by patients or their improvement under targeted treatment.

Intranasal Insulin in Alzheimer’s Disease: A Pragmatic Account

“…Using Austin's *13+ conception, of performatives, these utterances can be understood as speech acts which are considered to "do something", in other words, to perform acts of different sorts: apologize, thanks, name, marry, etc. Such speech acts which perform actions can be contrasted with language use whose function is to describe states of affairs (constatives) [6]. Thus, by pragmatic competence, we refer more generally to the study of linguistic utterances and their association with the speaker and addressee's intentions, plans and beliefs.…”

“…This refers to "felicity conditions" or those conditions which have to be satisfied in order for a performative utterance to be satisfactory. As Schatz & González [6] note: "These felicity conditions are not equal, and their violations are also dissimilar. Violations of some conditions result in misfires, when the intended action is not performed.…”

“…The long-term use of intra-insulin in MCI and moderate AD has been shown to improve scores on face and affect matching tests, to stabilize language fluency tests and to significantly improve executive functioning and visuo-spatial skills [5]. Extended intra-nasal insulin also improved pragmatic competence in the domain of jokes, self-expression and empathy in patients with MCI and moderate AD [6].…”

“…Hamidovic [4] for a contrary view in abstinent smokers). Improved pragmatic function in patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and early to moderate Alzheimer's Disease (AD) after targeted therapy has been the subject of several studies [5][6][7]. Accumulating evidence suggests the capacity of the short-term administration of intra-nasal insulin to improve verbal fluency and to slow cognitive decline in the areas of immediate recall and list learning recall in adults with MCI and early AD [8,9].…”

“…This article finds that intra-nasal insulin treatment significantly augments the use of humor, irony and sarcasm even in later stages of AD. Employing a model of pragmatic competence [6], we show the ability of a late-stage AD patient under long-term, targeted treatment to use selfdeprecatory humor, sarcasm and metaphor in multiple inter-personal settings. We claim that the ability to recognize and tell jokes requires continued pragmatic competence because the speaker needs to assess the reaction of the addressee and to understand the meaning underlying the relevant discourse utterances to be then able to flout the conversational maxims to make a joke [7].…”