The contributors to this volume reference a shared, longitudinal corpus of spontaneous conversation elicited in natural settings from speakers with moderate to late moderate Alzheimer's Disease, utilizing other collections as appropriate, to analyze conversation, discourse and written text by and about Alzheimer's speech. Cross-disciplinary contributions from the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Germany, representing linguistics, gerontology, geriatric nursing, computer science, and communications disorders report on empirically-based investigations of social and pragmatic language competencies and strategies retained by AD patients which could ground communication enhancements or interventions.

Dementia is an urgent global concern, often termed a widespread ‘problem’, ‘tragedy’ or ‘burden’ and a subject best addressed by health and social policy and practice. However, creative writers can offer powerful and imaginative insights into the experience of dementia across cultures and over time. This cross-disciplinary volume explores how engaging with dementia through its myriad literary representations can help to deepen and humanise attitudes to people living with the condition. Offering and interrogating a wide array of perspectives about how dementia might be ‘imagined’, this book allows us to see how different ways of being can inflect one another. By drawing on the ‘lived’ experience of the individual unique person and their loved ones, literature can contribute to a deeper and more compassionate and more liberating attitude to a phenomenon that is both natural and unnatural. Novels, plays and stories reveal a rich panoply of responses ranging from the tragic to the comic, allowing us to understand that people with dementia often offer us models of humour, courage and resilience, and carers can also embody a range of responses from rigidity to compassion. Dementia and Literature problematises the subject of dementia, encouraging us all to question our own hegemonies critically and creatively. Drawing on literary studies, cultural studies, education, clinical psychology, psychiatry, nursing and gerontology, this book is a fascinating contribution to the emerging area of the medical and health humanities. The book will be of interest to those living with dementia and their caregivers as well as to the academic community and policy makers.

Fillers are items that speakers insert in spontaneous speech as a repair strategy. Types of fillers include hesitation markers and placeholders. Both are used to fill pauses that arise during planning problems or in lexical retrieval failure. However, while hesitation markers may not bear any resemblance to lexical items they replace, placeholders typically share some morphosyntactic properties with the target form. Additionally, fillers can function as a pragmatic tool, in order to replace lexical items that the speaker wants to avoid mentioning for some reason. The present volume is the first collection on the topic of fillers and will be a useful reference work for future investigations on the topic. It consists of typological surveys and in-depth studies exploring the form and use of fillers across languages and sections of different populations, including cognitively impaired speakers. The volume will be interesting to typologists and linguists working in discourse studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Health Communication consists of forty chapters that provide a broad, comprehensive, and systematic overview of the role that linguistics plays within health communication research and its applications. The Handbook is divided into three sections: Individuals’ everyday health communication Health professionals’ communicative practices Patient-provider communication in interaction Special attention is given to cross-cutting themes, including the role of technology in health communication, narrative, and observations of authentic, naturally-occurring contexts. The chapters are written by international authorities representing a wide range of perspectives and approaches. Building on established work with cutting-edge studies on the changing health communication landscape, this volume will be an essential reference for all those involved in health communication and applied linguistics research and practice.

The new edition of the leading reference work on Clinical Linguistics, fully updated with new research and developments in the field The Handbook of Clinical Linguistics, Second Edition provides a timely and authoritative survey of this interdisciplinary field, exploring the application of linguistic theory and method to the study of speech and language disorders. Containing 42 in-depth chapters by an international panel of established and rising scholars, this classic volume addresses a wide range of pathologies while offering valuable insights into key theory and research, multilingual and cross-linguistics factors, analysis and assessment methods, and more. Now in its second edition, The Handbook of Clinical Linguistics features nine entirely new chapters on clinical corpus linguistics, multimodal analysis, cognition and language, the linguistics of sign languages, clinical phonotactics, typical and nontypical phonological development, clinical phonology and phonological assessment, and two chapters on instrumental analysis of voice and speech production. Revised and expanded chapters incorporate new research in clinical linguistics and place greater emphasis on specific speech disorders, connections to literacy, and multilingualism. This invaluable reference works: Reflects the latest developments in new research and data, as well as changing perspectives about the priorities and future of the field Features new and revised chapters throughout, many with new authors or authorial teams Offers well-rounded coverage of the major areas of the speech sciences in the study of communication disorders Discusses how mainstream theories and descriptions of language are influenced by clinical research Building on the success of the first edition, The Handbook of Clinical Linguistics, Second Edition, is an indispensable resource for researchers and advanced students across all areas of speech-language sciences, including speech disorders, speech pathology, speech therapy, communication disorders, cognitive linguistics, and neurolinguistics.

Long regarded as a peripheral issue, phraseology is now taking centre stage in a wide range of fields. This recent explosion of interest undoubtedly has a great deal to do with the development of corpus linguistics research, which has both demonstrated the key role of phraseological expressions in language and provided researchers with automated methods of extraction and analysis. The aim of this volume is to take stock of current research in phraseology from a variety of perspectives: theoretical, descriptive, contrastive, cultural, lexicographic and computational. It contains overview chapters by leading experts in the field and a series of case studies focusing on a wide range of multiword units: collocations, similes, idioms, routine formulae and recurrent phrases. The volume is an invitation for experienced phraseologists to look at the field with different eyes and a useful introduction for the many researchers who are intrigued by phraseology but need help in finding their way in this rich but complex domain.

​This book examines the under-researched field of communication by bilingual people with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT). The aging population is increasingly affected by neurocognitive diseases such as DAT, and over the past 30 years, the growing research body concerned with monolingual DAT discourses has seen significant growth. The findings from monolingual studies and institutional settings highlight the importance of code choice for a person’s sense of autonomy, especially against the background of changing communicational abilities. Adding a new perspective, this book investigates how ten Puerto Rican speakers living with varying stages of DAT draw on their bilingual resources to accomplish verbal interaction in informal settings with their primary care partners. Drawing on narrative interviews conducted in Orlando, Florida, this multi-case study investigates situated language choices and code-switches by applying the ethno-social approach, i.e. combining features of conversation analysis and ethnography of communication. The author sheds light both on the question of how people living with DAT engage in conversations and which strategies they employ in their languages (English and Spanish) to reach their communicative goals. Specifically, by analyzing the role of code choice and code-switching in a qualitative manner, two main functional categories emerge: discourse-related and participant-related code-switching. Bilingual competencies remain even among participants living with severe DAT symptoms, as evident in retained interactional sequences such as salutations. Persons living with DAT competently negotiate code, either through exploratory code-switching or metalinguistic commentary, emphasizing the need for conversational partners to be sensitive to the communicative needs, in both languages, of speakers living with DAT. This book will be of interest to students and researchers working on dementia discourses, health communication, multilingualism and ageing, as well as Bilingual/ Multilingual families or individuals living with dementia.