The older adult population is growing in epic proportions. With this growth, chronic disease is a... more The older adult population is growing in epic proportions. With this growth, chronic disease is also increasing, especially the chronic disease of diabetes. Older adults often have difficulty communicating with health care professionals about their illnesses and often have low health literacy and poor understanding of their illness processes. Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRNs) serve a vital role in not only caring for this burgeoning population of older adults with diabetes, but also are the key to ensuring good communication and understanding of the disease process with their patients. This article discusses the importance of the lifeworld in older adults with chronic diseases such as diabetes and presents multiple qualitative analytic approaches utilized to better understand the intricacies of these conversations with older adults with diabetes. The key conversation points are then discussed to assist APRNs on how to cue into certain words within the conversation that wil...
... 19 Boyd H. Davis & Margaret Maclagan words to signaling problems in finding key componen... more ... 19 Boyd H. Davis & Margaret Maclagan words to signaling problems in finding key components in the thread of the story (Davis ... Formulaic phrases often act as discourse-level fillers; they may, in that sense, aid the unimpaired speakers' inferences (Bezuidenhout & Morris 2004 ...
Videos and multimedia are increasingly used to stimulate reminiscence in dementia care. However, ... more Videos and multimedia are increasingly used to stimulate reminiscence in dementia care. However, they are also valuable in eliciting a wide range of language patterns that are not necessarily keyed to reminiscence about self. Low-technology, home-made generic and personalized videos were tested with 2 samples of persons with dementia, to increase engagement and support the retention of identity. Participants showed a slight, though not significant, preference for looking first at personalized videos and produced a wider range of conversational language topics and phrasal patterns in response to the generic videos.
Journal of Interactional Research in Communication Disorders, 2015
People with cognitive language impairments such as Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) are often reporte... more People with cognitive language impairments such as Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) are often reported to manifest difficulties within the domain of pragmatics (Togher, 1998; 2013). In particular they may struggle with subtle aspects of communication that have been noted in politeness theory (Brown and Levinson, 1987), such as the appropriate recognition and use of politeness strategies for speech acts including apologies or requests. In this report, we analyze responses by unimpaired adults to prompted production of specific directives and requests specified by the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCO), finding they identify lay expectations for conversational politeness strategies. This preliminary study allows us to contribute to establishing a finegrained set of expectations for correct answers by future American subjects as clinicians working with cognitive language impairment may not always have training in or experience with regionally-cued expectations contextualizing pragmatic subtleties in interactions with persons having impairments such as cerebral lesions.IntroductionPragmatics is that field of language study that looks at usage to see how people manage to interact without alienating each other. It includes knowing who can and cannot speak in certain locations, situations, or circumstances, and what they can or cannot talk about appropriately, all of which is part of the knowledge that speakers gain from participating in language socialization practices over time (Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986). People generally don't think consciously about the pragmatics or the linguistic features used in social situations: we have been socialized into their selection and sanction since childhood, and we 'know' them - unless they are, quite literally, knocked out of our heads. Lacking pragmatic competence is to lack access to one's culturally-appropriate linguistic repertoire of speech acts, and thus to one's full participation in the social aspects of daily life. For adults, this shrunken repertoire can mean difficulty in maintaining relationships, employment, even ordinary conversation in which they may be seen as anywhere from tactless to cold to offensive. For example, persons learning a second language face multiple difficulties in learning culturally and linguistically appropriate ways of talking, whether it be learning register, illocutionary force, or specific sanctions surrounding speech acts such as compliments (Rose and Kasper, 2001. Recovering competence in the appropriate use of speech acts in a language one already speaks can be difficult for persons with acquired neurological disorders (Cummings, 2009), such as right or left hemisphere injury, or traumatic brain injury (TBI). This discussion focuses on lay expectations for adult use of politeness formulas or routines in response to an initial American adaptation of an Italian inventory of pragmatics affected by such acquired disorders. Its aim is to test the applicability of ABaCo for an American audience, and to screen for regional differences.The Assessment Battery of Communication (ABaCO) was developed as a new protocol to conduct pragmatic assessments of persons with cognitive impairments at the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Turin; its contents are detailed below. The Battery which has been trialed with Italian TBI patients (Angeleri et al., 2008); Italian children with SLI (Bosco et al., 2013), and Italians with schizophrenia (Colle et al., 2013). Sacco (2008) provides information on its initial validation. It has also provided researchers with normative data stratified for sex, age and education, from 300 persons 15-75 years old (Angeleri et al., 2012) and with the results of testing two equivalent forms. It has also been used to evaluate 30 children with TBI (Bosco et al., 2012; Colle et al., 2013), to provide before- and after-testing. Recently, their team has tested the efficacy of the Battery with 17 persons having schizophrenia against 17 without it. …
AIM This pilot study was designed to examine the feasibility of using telemedicine to deliver a f... more AIM This pilot study was designed to examine the feasibility of using telemedicine to deliver a fall prevention program, a modified Otago exercise program, to low-income older adults living independently in affordable housing apartments. METHODS A mixed-methods feasibility study. Participants were divided into two groups: one group participated in a 12-week modified Otago fall prevention program via telehealth, while the other group participated in the program with an on-site instructor. Performance-based measures of physical function and self-report measures for self-efficacy for exercise and social connectedness were collected pre- and post-intervention and 1 year later. RESULTS All participants completed the 12-week intervention and expressed satisfaction with both the telehealth program and the on-site instructor-led program. There were no major differences in performance or self-report measures between the two groups, showing that telehealth-delivered applications can be effect...
The COVID-19 pandemic challenges us to think outside of the box to respond to this unprecedented ... more The COVID-19 pandemic challenges us to think outside of the box to respond to this unprecedented global crisis. In this letter, we propose a pilot study to use a socially assistive robot to help meet social needs for older adults with cognitive impairment residing in long-term care facilities.
The older adult population is growing in epic proportions. With this growth, chronic disease is a... more The older adult population is growing in epic proportions. With this growth, chronic disease is also increasing, especially the chronic disease of diabetes. Older adults often have difficulty communicating with health care professionals about their illnesses and often have low health literacy and poor understanding of their illness processes. Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRNs) serve a vital role in not only caring for this burgeoning population of older adults with diabetes, but also are the key to ensuring good communication and understanding of the disease process with their patients. This article discusses the importance of the lifeworld in older adults with chronic diseases such as diabetes and presents multiple qualitative analytic approaches utilized to better understand the intricacies of these conversations with older adults with diabetes. The key conversation points are then discussed to assist APRNs on how to cue into certain words within the conversation that wil...
... 19 Boyd H. Davis & Margaret Maclagan words to signaling problems in finding key componen... more ... 19 Boyd H. Davis & Margaret Maclagan words to signaling problems in finding key components in the thread of the story (Davis ... Formulaic phrases often act as discourse-level fillers; they may, in that sense, aid the unimpaired speakers' inferences (Bezuidenhout & Morris 2004 ...
Videos and multimedia are increasingly used to stimulate reminiscence in dementia care. However, ... more Videos and multimedia are increasingly used to stimulate reminiscence in dementia care. However, they are also valuable in eliciting a wide range of language patterns that are not necessarily keyed to reminiscence about self. Low-technology, home-made generic and personalized videos were tested with 2 samples of persons with dementia, to increase engagement and support the retention of identity. Participants showed a slight, though not significant, preference for looking first at personalized videos and produced a wider range of conversational language topics and phrasal patterns in response to the generic videos.
Journal of Interactional Research in Communication Disorders, 2015
People with cognitive language impairments such as Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) are often reporte... more People with cognitive language impairments such as Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) are often reported to manifest difficulties within the domain of pragmatics (Togher, 1998; 2013). In particular they may struggle with subtle aspects of communication that have been noted in politeness theory (Brown and Levinson, 1987), such as the appropriate recognition and use of politeness strategies for speech acts including apologies or requests. In this report, we analyze responses by unimpaired adults to prompted production of specific directives and requests specified by the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCO), finding they identify lay expectations for conversational politeness strategies. This preliminary study allows us to contribute to establishing a finegrained set of expectations for correct answers by future American subjects as clinicians working with cognitive language impairment may not always have training in or experience with regionally-cued expectations contextualizing pragmatic subtleties in interactions with persons having impairments such as cerebral lesions.IntroductionPragmatics is that field of language study that looks at usage to see how people manage to interact without alienating each other. It includes knowing who can and cannot speak in certain locations, situations, or circumstances, and what they can or cannot talk about appropriately, all of which is part of the knowledge that speakers gain from participating in language socialization practices over time (Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986). People generally don't think consciously about the pragmatics or the linguistic features used in social situations: we have been socialized into their selection and sanction since childhood, and we 'know' them - unless they are, quite literally, knocked out of our heads. Lacking pragmatic competence is to lack access to one's culturally-appropriate linguistic repertoire of speech acts, and thus to one's full participation in the social aspects of daily life. For adults, this shrunken repertoire can mean difficulty in maintaining relationships, employment, even ordinary conversation in which they may be seen as anywhere from tactless to cold to offensive. For example, persons learning a second language face multiple difficulties in learning culturally and linguistically appropriate ways of talking, whether it be learning register, illocutionary force, or specific sanctions surrounding speech acts such as compliments (Rose and Kasper, 2001. Recovering competence in the appropriate use of speech acts in a language one already speaks can be difficult for persons with acquired neurological disorders (Cummings, 2009), such as right or left hemisphere injury, or traumatic brain injury (TBI). This discussion focuses on lay expectations for adult use of politeness formulas or routines in response to an initial American adaptation of an Italian inventory of pragmatics affected by such acquired disorders. Its aim is to test the applicability of ABaCo for an American audience, and to screen for regional differences.The Assessment Battery of Communication (ABaCO) was developed as a new protocol to conduct pragmatic assessments of persons with cognitive impairments at the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Turin; its contents are detailed below. The Battery which has been trialed with Italian TBI patients (Angeleri et al., 2008); Italian children with SLI (Bosco et al., 2013), and Italians with schizophrenia (Colle et al., 2013). Sacco (2008) provides information on its initial validation. It has also provided researchers with normative data stratified for sex, age and education, from 300 persons 15-75 years old (Angeleri et al., 2012) and with the results of testing two equivalent forms. It has also been used to evaluate 30 children with TBI (Bosco et al., 2012; Colle et al., 2013), to provide before- and after-testing. Recently, their team has tested the efficacy of the Battery with 17 persons having schizophrenia against 17 without it. …
AIM This pilot study was designed to examine the feasibility of using telemedicine to deliver a f... more AIM This pilot study was designed to examine the feasibility of using telemedicine to deliver a fall prevention program, a modified Otago exercise program, to low-income older adults living independently in affordable housing apartments. METHODS A mixed-methods feasibility study. Participants were divided into two groups: one group participated in a 12-week modified Otago fall prevention program via telehealth, while the other group participated in the program with an on-site instructor. Performance-based measures of physical function and self-report measures for self-efficacy for exercise and social connectedness were collected pre- and post-intervention and 1 year later. RESULTS All participants completed the 12-week intervention and expressed satisfaction with both the telehealth program and the on-site instructor-led program. There were no major differences in performance or self-report measures between the two groups, showing that telehealth-delivered applications can be effect...
The COVID-19 pandemic challenges us to think outside of the box to respond to this unprecedented ... more The COVID-19 pandemic challenges us to think outside of the box to respond to this unprecedented global crisis. In this letter, we propose a pilot study to use a socially assistive robot to help meet social needs for older adults with cognitive impairment residing in long-term care facilities.
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