Pragmatic Language Impairments

The essay will be about pragmatic language impairments. In particular as a result of damage to the RIGHT hemisphere (NOT the LEFT hemisphere). You can certainly start off in the Introduction by mentioning the theory of lateralisation (that is how right and left hemisphere have supposedly different functions). You can also explain that there is a lot of research about language impairments when the left hemisphere is damaged (the left hemisphere is considered the site of language), but there is not as much about RIGHT hemisphere which is the focus of the essay. Explain the role of the right hemisphere with regards to pragmatic functions. Remember that this is an essay for a module in Neurolinguistics. Therefore, the focus has to be on the linguistic aspect, anything that is related to language (ignore things like difficulty in understanding people’s facial expressions or changes in behaviour due to right hemisphere damage). You only have to analyse the effects on different aspects of language such as

– Speech acts (a threat, joke, promise).

• Register (may be overly informal).
• Initiating, terminating, turn-taking in

conversational exchanges.

• Providing sufficient information for

communicative intention (relevance).

• Adequate or appropriate prosody/tone.
• Coherence of discourse topic, maintenance and

shift

I am attaching a file called “Pragmatic impairments” which is a set of slides by Marjorie Lorch. Those slides are the actual class I had in this topic. Please, read to get an idea on how to structure the essay and which topics to cover and DO NOT USE IT AS A REFERENCE. I am also attaching 15 other sources but I will need a total of 23-25. Ideally the sources will have to be within the last 5-7 years (10 years maximum) and preferably from my University digital catalogue (I will give you the login as such as a writer has been assigned).

The idea of the essay is to analyse how damage to the right hemisphere can have an impact on language and cause pragmatic impairments.