Verbal play in dementia care

Abstract

Humor has been found to be used as a discourse strategy for negotiating power relations and mitigating FTAs in institutional elderly care. Drawing from two years of ethnography in two adult day centers in Taiwan, this article examines verbal play between a person living with dementia and a caregiver over time to illustrate how verbal play is used as meaningful, tailored practices for person-centered dementia care that leads to enhanced cognition and positive emotion. The caregiver’s framing of dementia care as person-centered and her laminating multiple frames of interactions to enrich communicative environments provides a fruitful approach to dementia care in institutional contexts and beyond.