Blind Peoples Pragmatic Abilities

Description

This book offers an analysis of blind peoples pragmatic abilities. By exploring the impact of visual impairment on the interpretation of utterances, it identifies common ground between the pragmatic analysis of comprehension and visual impairment, and shows how the study of pragmatics can be enriched by the study of visual impairment. It also investigates the role of accessible contextual cues and the effect of visual impairment on comprehension. Although it is generally accepted that context plays a crucial role in comprehension, it is still unknown what effect a lack (or insufficiency) of certain contextual information has on interpretation and mutual communication between people. This raises the question of whether people who are blind are equally competent and successful in interpreting spoken language as sighted people. Also, bearing in mind the specific difficulties and delays faced by blind children in social and linguistic development indicated in previous studies, it is worth exploring whether these initial difficulties are eventually overcome by blind adults. This book, in offering a satisfactory answer to this relevant question, is one of the very few publications devoted to the analysis of the pragmalinguistic consequences of blindness. Table of Contents Introduction Chapter One Introduction Pragmatics – the study of language understanding and context Communication and comprehension The Code Model The Inferential Model The Ostensive-Inferential Communication Model Context Perception and context Context and general knowledge Context and content Misunderstandings and communication failures Summary Chapter Two Introduction Developmental pragmatics The development of pragmatic abilities in sighted children The development of pragmatic abilities in visually impaired children The cognition and comprehension of blind adults Summary Chapter Three Introduction The study Hypotheses Participants Material Procedure Analysis Results and discussion Implicature Reference assignment Ambiguity resolution Humour and figurative language comprehension Mind-reading Concluding remarks and summary Summary and Conclusion References Appendix A Appendix B Index