Politeness strategies in response to prompted directives in the preliminary English version of the ABaCO Battery

People with cognitive language impairments such as Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) are often reported to manifest difficulties within the domain of pragmatics (Togher, 1998; 2013). In particular they may struggle with subtle aspects of communication that have been noted in politeness theory (Brown and Levinson, 1987), such as the appropriate recognition and use of politeness strategies for speech acts including apologies or requests. In this report, we analyze responses by unimpaired adults to prompted production of specific directives and requests specified by the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCO), finding they identify lay expectations for conversational politeness strategies. This preliminary study allows us to contribute to establishing a finegrained set of expectations for correct answers by future American subjects as clinicians working with cognitive language impairment may not always have training in or experience with regionally-cued expectations contextualizing pragmatic subtleties in interactions with persons having impairments such as cerebral lesions.IntroductionPragmatics is that field of language study that looks at usage to see how people manage to interact without alienating each other. It includes knowing who can and cannot speak in certain locations, situations, or circumstances, and what they can or cannot talk about appropriately, all of which is part of the knowledge that speakers gain from participating in language socialization practices over time (Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986). People generally don't think consciously about the pragmatics or the linguistic features used in social situations: we have been socialized into their selection and sanction since childhood, and we 'know' them - unless they are, quite literally, knocked out of our heads. Lacking pragmatic competence is to lack access to one's culturally-appropriate linguistic repertoire of speech acts, and thus to one's full participation in the social aspects of daily life. For adults, this shrunken repertoire can mean difficulty in maintaining relationships, employment, even ordinary conversation in which they may be seen as anywhere from tactless to cold to offensive. For example, persons learning a second language face multiple difficulties in learning culturally and linguistically appropriate ways of talking, whether it be learning register, illocutionary force, or specific sanctions surrounding speech acts such as compliments (Rose and Kasper, 2001. Recovering competence in the appropriate use of speech acts in a language one already speaks can be difficult for persons with acquired neurological disorders (Cummings, 2009), such as right or left hemisphere injury, or traumatic brain injury (TBI). This discussion focuses on lay expectations for adult use of politeness formulas or routines in response to an initial American adaptation of an Italian inventory of pragmatics affected by such acquired disorders. Its aim is to test the applicability of ABaCo for an American audience, and to screen for regional differences.The Assessment Battery of Communication (ABaCO) was developed as a new protocol to conduct pragmatic assessments of persons with cognitive impairments at the Center for Cognitive Science at the University of Turin; its contents are detailed below. The Battery which has been trialed with Italian TBI patients (Angeleri et al., 2008); Italian children with SLI (Bosco et al., 2013), and Italians with schizophrenia (Colle et al., 2013). Sacco (2008) provides information on its initial validation. It has also provided researchers with normative data stratified for sex, age and education, from 300 persons 15-75 years old (Angeleri et al., 2012) and with the results of testing two equivalent forms. It has also been used to evaluate 30 children with TBI (Bosco et al., 2012; Colle et al., 2013), to provide before- and after-testing. Recently, their team has tested the efficacy of the Battery with 17 persons having schizophrenia against 17 without it. …