Abstract
Interest in pragmatics in speech-language pathology emerged in the 1970s (Bates, 1976; Dore, 1974) and exploded in the 1980s. Jack Damico, a speech-language pathologist (SLP), and John W. Oller Jr., a linguistic, were among early researchers to propose strategies for clinical assessment of pragmatics and the value of doing so. In a 1980 issue of Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in school, they demonstrated the merits of pragmatic criteria in teacher referrals for language disorders in children (Damico & Oller, 1980). They trained 54 K–Grade 5 teachers in two types of criteria for referral: half of the teachers were trained in morphological and surface, syntactic criteria, such as noun–verb agreement, tense marking, and pluralization, and half were trained in pragmatic criteria focusing on deeper aspects of meaning and communicative effectiveness, such as general fluency, topic maintenance, and specificity of referring terms. All referrals from both groups were reevaluated by a panel of judges following the state-determined procedures for assignment to remedial programs. Teachers who were taught to use pragmatic criteria in identifying children with a language disorder identified significantly more children and were more often correct in their identification than teachers taught to use syntactic criteria.
In a later work, Damico (1985) defined pragmatic deficits in conversation in terms of Grice’s maxims (Grice, 1975), which are described in the article “Understanding Grice’s Maxims in Conversation,” in this issue of Word of Mouth. Within the four Gricean maxims, Damico described 17 types of conversational violations. Table 1 provides definitions and examples for each of these violations with examples. Damico recommends obtaining a language sample of about 180 utterances collected over two sessions. The sample should be obtained during a conversation interaction rather than a picture description or story-telling task because the intent is to document the student’s interactive discourse skills. The clinician then transcribes the language sample, preserving the nonlinguistic context, intonational contour, and pauses and false starts. The sample is segmented into communication units (an independent clause with its modifiers; a C-unit includes one main clause with all subordinate clauses attached to it). False starts, mazes, and hesitation phenomena are maintained in the transcription. Each C-unit is marked for any of the described pragmatic error behaviors. The evaluator can put the code initials for the violations on the transcript. The evaluator counts the number of C-units with one or more discourse errors and determines the frequency of occurrence of each of the behaviors. (The clinician can make a list of the 17 violations and put tally marks by each instance of a violation.) The evaluator should also note the number of single-word utterances and nonverbal responses. Individuals with discourse difficulties may compensate by using short utterances or nonverbal communication. Although this can be appropriate, it may hide language difficulties.
Types of Violations in Conversational Maxims
This type of clinical discourse analysis is a descriptive tool. It should not be used to qualify students for services, but it can be useful in developing student goals. Speech-language pathologists are to frame their assessments and interventions in the International Classification of Functioning, which requires that they address both the capacity to do specific tasks (the specific language skills students display in structured contexts) and students’ communicative performance in participatory conversational situations. By conducting a clinical discourse analysis, the clinician gains insight into how students use their communication skills in naturalistic contexts. The ultimate outcome of therapy should be effective use of language skills in interactions in life situations.