Pragmatic impairment and multimodal compensation in older adults with dementia

Compensation emerges when older adults encounter pragmatic impairment. Though studies are plentiful in pragmatic impairments of patients with aphasia or neurodegenerative diseases, discussions about compensation, especially older adult’s multimodal performance, need further generalization and interpretation. To fill this gap, this paper attempts to sketch the performance of multimodal compensation of Chinese older adults in pragmatic disorders and its corresponding pragmatic functions. Based on different viewing perspectives, this paper distinguishes three types of compensatory performances, i.e. compensation from inter- and intra- personal perspectives, compensation across language levels, and compensation across semiotic systems and modalities, by giving examples from Multimodal Corpus of Gerontic Discourse constructed by the authors’ team and explains how these compensatory performances help to complete communication. Compensatory performances of older adults classified and analyzed in this study can be explained by brain adaptation and compensation hypothesis. Compensatory performances are on account of interconnection among multiple sensory organs and their neural networks. The exploration of performance and mechanism of multimodal compensation of Chinese older adults not only verifies and expands brain adaptation and compensation theories, but also may prompt the communicative efficiency of older adults when encountering pragmatic impairments.