ABSTRACT
All communication acts involve cognition; the division between socially acquired language resources and cognitive resources that support language processing, noted in chapter one, is in some senses arbitrary. It is a necessary division that, when analyzing language, allows researchers to distinguish cognitive resources that are subconscious mechanisms (e.g., working memory) from aspects of communication that may have been socially learned and are, therefore, intentional choices a speaker makes when addressing an interlocutor. Standardized assessments of language are designed to tap into specific cognitive resources (e.g., attention, working memory, long-term memory, sentence comprehension, etc.) that support language use and often use linguistic formats (e.g., closed questions) that require specific responses. In contrast, less formal contexts such as clinical/research interviews or narrative tasks (e.g., asking a client/participant to describe their weekend or recall life-history events) can assess the language skills of an individual in a manner that overlaps (to some degree) with the structure of everyday conversations. Clinical/research interviews initially follow a question-answer format with expectations that the interviewee will produce information that is relevant and/or accurate. In this respect, clinical/research interviews may represent an interactional context that might potentially pose a threat to a person with dementia’s (PWD) self-esteem if they are unable to recall the relevant information. However, it is also the case that there are elements of clinical/research interviews that offer more discursive flexibility. For example, the participants may engage in small talk and topic shiftmore freely. Interactions in follow-up interviews may reflect the type of conversations that take place between acquaintances or friends (Guendouzi & Müller, 2006), that is, there may be discussion of shared information that is more personal in nature (e.g., personal interests, past events or family members’ well-being, etc.).
