When Language Breaks Down
When Language Breaks Down
Jessica de Villiers, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
Doctors, nurses, and other caregivers often know what people with Alzheimer's disease or Asperger's 'sound like' - that is they recognise patterns in people's discourse, from sounds and silences, to words, sentences and story structures. Such discourse patterns may inform their clinical judgements and affect the decisions they make. However, this knowledge is often tacit, like recognising a regional accent without knowing how to describe its features. This is the first book to present models for comprehensively describing discourse specifically in clinical contexts and to illustrate models with detailed analyses of discourse patterns associated with degenerative (Alzheimer's) and developmental (autism spectrum) disorders. The book is aimed not only at advanced students and researchers in linguistics, discourse analysis, speech pathology and clinical psychology but also at researchers, clinicians and caregivers for whom explicit knowledge of discourse patterns might be helpful.
- Presents new models for describing and analysing language in disorders
- Examples are based on the author's own research on the language of people with Alzheimer's disease and autism spectrum disorders
- The descriptions of discourse patterns are presented in non-technical language
Reviews & endorsements
'… an important contribution to demonstrating the value of discourse analysis for clinical diagnosis and for the study of patients with neurological and affective disorders … a welcome synthesis of traditional, neuro-imaging, and linguistic methods.' Jay Lemke, University of Michigan
'… provides theoretical and descriptive tools for analysing language in clinical syndromes that are clear but solidly grounded. The emphasis is on the autistic spectrum and Alzheimer's disease but beyond these disorders and the specific analyses, the authors provide a way of thinking about language in clinical impairments. It presents numerous worked out linguistic analyses and offers suggestions for further specific research.' Jonathan Fine, Department of English, Bar-Ilan University
Product details
February 2010Hardback
9780521889780
270 pages
235 × 158 × 18 mm
0.55kg
28 b/w illus. 20 tables
Temporarily unavailable - available from May 2023
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1. Introduction to clinical discourse analysis
- 2. Theoretical and clinical contexts
- 3. Conversation analysis and intonation in English
- 4. Grammar
- 5. Contexts of culture, context of situation and phase
- 6. Study design
- 7. Differential diagnosis and monitoring
- 8. Cognitive models, inferencing, and affect
- 9. Modelling information across domains
- Closings remarks.
