Pragmatic Language Impairment - Case Study Example

Pragmatic Difficulties Depicted in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time Communicating effectively with other people helps show how an individual’s level of socialisation through interacting positively and appropriately with others. Although misunderstandings are expected to happen, these are not enough to garner enough problems and create constant friction between parties to disrupt normal everyday routines. However, non-verbal cues that most people take for granted like body language, nuances, contexts and even simple things such as jokes or metaphors can be hard to understand for people with cognitive difficulties that can affect their communication skills with other people. Such individuals are diagnosed as suffering from problems on socialisation and in turn also have problems with making relevant or appropriate responses to exchanged communications in accordance to the implied meanings, which is called Pragmatic Language Impairment (Koning and Magill-Evans, 2001). Pragmatic Language Impairment is a problem that these individuals have and is characterised by the lack of pragmatics or fitness of their responses to questions or phrases may seem strange and unrelated to the original conversation’s context, which can be perceived as unsuitable or as an act of tactlessness. Individuals with Pragmatic Language Impairment can only converse successfully with others if the questions are straightforward or blunt, but once the need for inner meanings and other nuances are needed, they can come up with ambiguous or vague answers unexpected and unrelated to what was asked from them, which may cause other people to misunderstand them as anti-social or unfeeling and stop talking to them and further separating them from the rest of society. A fictional case of such an individual was depicted in Mark Haddon’s book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, wherein the protagonist’s problems with socialisation and use of pragmatic language was shown in relation to interactions with other people without such issues. The book was not marketed as an accurate depiction of Asperger’s syndrome sufferers but it gives a glimpse on how such individuals think, adding insight to their troubles in socialisation and communication. As such, this paper aims to show how Haddon’s sentence and paragraph structures contribute to give the readers an impression on the pragmatic difficulties of individuals with Pragmatic Language Impairment in surviving in a society that depends on human-to-human interactions. Literature on Pragmatics and Relevance to People with Pragmatic Language Impairment Pragmatics can be considered to be an important part of languages and communication, wherein aside from lexis and semantics it gives a particular meaning to words and helps others understand how one person thinks (Carston, 2002). Introducing pragmatics to a larger society can initially create confusion due to conflicts between and among individuals according to their own beliefs but it is possible that through common rules and social constructs such as cultural norms more people can understand each other’s logic and exchange perspectives, even with the use of short or ambiguous sentences (Cutting, 2002). For instance, it was mentioned by Kracht (n.d.) that the pragmatics of words will not always be true but will always depend on how a person understands this based on their own experiences and perspectives, and how these people will convey such thoughts to others without losing their meaning. During conversations, reasoning on the intentions of what other people say or want puts meaning to the speakers’ sentences based on how listeners’ perceive them, helping to create the most appropriate responses (Carston, 2003; Cutting, 2002). How one responds to conversations establishes whether one is socially-adept or not by creating the best reply to what another person says based on what was initially talked about. Most people have innate abilities to apply rationality and appropriateness in their responses using courtesy and appropriateness of words to what was asked Kracht (n.d.). But for some people with cognitive impairments, disrupted processes in the brain that prevent their normal formation of socialisation skills cause them from conversing pragmatically with others. For example, Pragmatic Language Impairment sufferers may perform cognitive abilities that other people are also capable of such as understanding logic, but they may lack in certain areas like socialisation such as having skills to rapidly recognise emotions based on facial expressions or understanding that other people may have other meanings with their words, among others (Koning and Magill-Evans, 2001). In addition to Autism Disorder Spectrum symptoms such as lack of eye contact, aloofness and inability to adapt or accept changes, it is also possible that the impairment makes it difficult to these individuals to interact due to the need to multitask recognising many visual and auditory cues while finding the most appropriate contextual responses, causing anxiety or stress. In this case too much information to process makes pragmatic thinking among Pragmatic Language Impairment sufferers nearly impossible, making it difficult for them to understand other people’s viewpoints and in developing long-lasting relationships and rely less on interacting with others (Koning and Magill-Evans, 2001). As such, multiple factors contribute to these individuals’ various difficulties in socialising and their pragmatic difficulties during such interactions. Methodology In order to show what makes a Pragmatic Language Impairment sufferer different from those who do not have the disorder, several sentences quoted from the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time are sourced out to compare the use of language by Christopher John Francis Boone, the main protagonist who also has the impairment against how someone who lacks the impairment speaks or writes, such as his mother, Judy Boone. The quotes shown for comparison are presented to explain the implications of these findings in relation to the issues of pragmatic difficulties mostly faced by sufferers of Pragmatic Language Impairment. Results and Implications of Findings Based on how the sentences and paragraphs are structured in the book, it becomes recognisable to readers that main protagonist Christopher has difficulty staying with just one subject and instead becomes side-tracked by adding numerous bits of information that in reality are often irrelevant to the main topic. For example, chapter 7 starts with “This is a murder mystery novel”, immediately followed by “Siobhan said I should write something I would want to read myself. Mostly I read books about science and maths. I do not like proper novels.” (Haddock, 2003, p.4). After a few more sentences were written after that describe how Siobhan looks like and how Mr Jeavons’ smell, and it is only by this time that Christopher returns back to his original topic about mystery novels (Haddock, 2003, p.5). This can confuse readers since the first sentence does not seem connected with the succeeding sentences, contrasting with what most people consider “meaningful” since there are no rational relationships between the sentences such as cause-and-effect relationships/if-then logic to describe Christopher’s reasons for stating why his book is a mystery novel (Carson, 2002; Cutting, 2002; Grundy, 2013). On the other hand, Judy’s letter possesses much more coherence and logic than Christopher’s, despite the incorrect spellings: Also we’ve moved into the new flat at last as you can see from the address. It’s not as nice as the old one and I don’t like Willesden very much, but it’s easier for Roger to get to work and he’s bought it (he only rented the other one), so we can get our own furniture and paint the walls the colour we want to. And that’s why it’s such a long time since I wrote my last letter to you because it’s been hard work packing up all our things and then unpacking them and then getting used to this new job. (Haddock, 2003, p.44). Judy’s letter shows more logic because she stated reasons why she did not write him a letter, wherein based on the context she and Roger moved into a new location. This contrasts Christopher’s sentences that seem disjointed and fleeting because again, he did not mention clearly why his book was a mystery novel, instead including a large amount of information that does not seem relevant to what he previously-said. The reduced reasoning or logic in Christopher’s sentences show the problem for Pragmatic Language Impairment sufferers in creating short, coherent and appropriately-responding sentences. The meanings or contexts of sentences from individuals with special needs such as Christopher not only end in very long but disjointed paragraphs in his monologue, but also extends to his responses with other people and affects how he earns their responses in return. Awkward exchanges and his inability to understand various cues (e.g. facial expressions, body language and metaphors) and his unintentional disregard of norms in interacting with people make him seem indifferent or insensitive, as also seen with other people having the same ailment (Haddock, 2003, p.1; Koning and Magill-Evans, 2001). For instance, Christopher’s strong need to investigate Wellington the dog’s death came at the cost of disturbing some of his neighbours, trespassing Mrs Shears’ property and getting into fights with his father throughout the story’s timeline (Haddock, 2003). This also showed in his conversation with his mother when he reasoned to his mother that he needs to take the exam very badly, despite the fact that Judy has her own problems such as suddenly losing her job and having threats from her husband about taking the matter of Christopher’s custody to court (Haddock, 2003, p. 96). Still in another example, Christopher’s lack of understanding of pragmatics showed when he did not understand the concept of jokes, explaining that “If I try to say the joke myself, making the word mean the three different things at the same time, it is like hearing three different pieces of music at the same time, which is uncomfortable and confusing and not nice like white noise” (Haddock, 2003, p.5). Aside from not understanding hidden meanings in words, anything ambiguous is also outside Christopher’s understanding such as the use of sarcasm: And when I was tired from screaming and Mother took me back in the flat in another taxi and the next morning was Saturday and she told Mr Shears to go out and get me some books about science and maths from the library, and they were called 100 Number Puzzles and The Origins of the Universe and Nuclear Power, but they were for children and they were not very good so I didn’t read them, and Mr Shears said, “Well, it’s nice to know my contribution is appreciated”. (Haddock, 2003, p. 96). For readers it may have been easy to see how Mr Shear’s remark as sarcasm since he took efforts but Christopher does not see it in this case, and because he does not understand underlying meanings he presumes everything he hears is what it truly means. Looking at these events, if Christopher’s condition was mentioned these actions make him seem selfish or antisocial, thus showing the typical problem of the pragmatically-impaired. When taken through the viewpoint of people who can understand pragmatics, these results imply that readers may have greater understanding of Christopher’s world more than he does, which makes him a person unable to grasp the meanings behind what were spoken in front of him. This also renders him incapable of understanding people at a personal level because the numerous meanings of each sentence or word makes it unpredictable that he cannot easily deduce other people feel at that moment. His preference to predictability makes him more drawn to animals or plants since these are straightforward and would not give him problems in understanding what they want to convey, which is different from how humans talk with each other through different strategies other than semantics (e.g emotions, facial expressions) (Grundy, 2013; Haddock, 2003). Also, despite Christopher’s abilities in math he can only relate to other people if he is spoken to without ambiguity or vagueness, otherwise he finds it tasking to converse pragmatically. In this manner, the inability of people like Christopher in attaching meaning to other people’s words based on their situations, their thoughts and beliefs, and other abstract or ambiguous ideas make pragmatics fail in such cases and cause misinterpretations in both the socially-adept and the pragmatically-impaired. Bibliography Carston, R., 2002. Linguistic meaning, communicated meaning and cognitive pragmatics. Mind & Language, 17(1-2), pp. 127-148. Cutting, J. 2002. Pragmatics and Discourse: A Resource Book for Students. London: Routledge. Grundy, P. 2013. Doing Pragmatics. Oxon: Routledge. Haddon, M., 2003. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. London: Jonathan Cape, Ltd. Koning, C. and Magill-Evans, J., 2001. Social and language skills in adolescent boys with Asperger syndrome. Autism, 5(1), pp. 23-36. Kracht, M. n.d. Pragmatics and Semantics. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA. Read More