Clinical Pragmatics
Pragmatics and cultural paradigms
Professionals related to language pathology need to have an analytical vision of the impact of cultural changes on the dynamics of communication, and how this influences language development. In the last decades, technological advances and greater accessibility to different individual and mass media have, for those who have access to them, turned the following into something natural:
- The superiority of visual stimuli over auditory stimuli and of intermittent attention over sustained attention.
- The overlapping of stimuli
- The alteration of daily routines, closely linked to time-space development directly affecting language (Mandler, 1999; Abraham & Brenca, 2009 b) and the organization of formats essential to the development of anticipation and the incorporation of waiting times.
Pragmatics and cultural paradigms
Time, a variable factor in every society and era, significantly influences the way in which an individual’s life is organized. It is a relevant part of the cultural paradigm. The same happens with the role that play has in childhood, the roles of adults and children, and the types of social stimuli to which they are all exposed.
All these factors are not minor in the early stages, especially in children with a certain degree of vulnerability. In such stages, the child’s cultural surroundings has a considerable impact on the type and degree of his/her communicative development and, consequently, on the three forces that make up the speech acts, which activate the minimum communication circuits.
The essence of language is its use, i.e., communication, and how it is displayed within a cultural context. Cultural paradigms are dynamic and affect language, at all ages, by generating positive as well as negative effects in the way people communicate.
In the case of negative effects, they may be expressed through pragmatic disorganizations and be mistakenly confused with communication pathology profiles.
Pragmatics and cultural paradigms
Hence the relevance of preventive work, as emphasized in the psycholinguistic and neuropediatric literature (Rapin, I., 1996; Hernández, j. et al, 2005; Tromblin, J. B., 1997; Bishop, D. & Norbury, C., 2002). This preventive work centers mainly on the assessment of socio-communicative developmental parameters during the first years of life, such as:
- Visual contact
- Visual fixation (fix and follow)
- Nonverbal expression of communicative intent
- Protoimperative and protodeclarative behaviors
- Shared attention
- Gesture richness
- Flexibility
- Interaction adjustment
- Quality of play
- Deictic gestures
- Alternation of turns
- Production of reference words
There is a characteristic that is common to all these parameters: their pragmatic nature..
It is a necessity for language therapists to prioritize the study of this aspect and systematically analyze it within the framework of a neurolinguistic assessment, both to contribute to a differential diagnosis in an interdisciplinary work and to outline a subsequent plan of speech and language treatment. In order to cooperate in this direction, we have developed the ICRA Method.