Our Prof. Louise Cummings contributed a chapter on "Pragmatic Impairment" in the Handbook of Language and Speech Disorders, 2nd Edition, published in March.
The chapter sets out to characterise the attribution of communicative intentions to a speaker during communication as the culmination of an extended process of mental state attribution that draws on "evidence" from various sources, including gestures, facial expressions, and the prosodic features of utterances.
The contribution of mentalizing skills to pragmatic aspects of language was demonstrated by examining the uptake of implicature, reference assignment, and information management in children and adults with a range of pragmatic impairments.
The chapter illustrates the close association between pragmatics and mentalizing skills by utilizing the language samples from discourse production tasks. It can be accessed via the Wiley Scholarly Network.
