BACKGROUND Pragmatic communication abilities may depend on intact frontal lobe systems. Independent evidence suggests that some persons with Parkinson's disease (PD) are impaired on measures of frontal lobe function. HYPOTHESIS We therefore hypothesized in Study 1 that pragmatic communication skills would be impaired in some persons with PD and would be linked to frontal dysfunction in these ...

INTRODUCTION Pragmatic randomized controlled trials (RCTs) mimic usual clinical practice and they are critical to inform decision-making by patients, clinicians and policy-makers in real-world settings. Pragmatic RCTs assess effectiveness of available medicines, while explanatory RCTs assess efficacy of investigational medicines. Explanatory and pragmatic are the extremes of a continuum. This d...

investigating transfer of one’s pragmatic knowledge of first language to his second or foreign language has been one of the areas of interest for researchers. however, there are contradictory results even within the scarce studies which have addressed transferability. this study was an attempt to investigate perceived pragmatic transferability of l1 refusal strategies by persian efl learners. s...

Pragmatic behavior, or the socially appropriate use of language, is important to parents of preschool children. In 1994 Becker noted several questions that still remain to be answered, including issues such as developmental changes in the pragmatic teaching of preschoolers and whether there are differences in the parents' goals for pragmatic teaching in private versus public interactions. The p...

This paper aims at a comprehensive review of the growing body of research in L2 pragmatic acquisition, including both theoretical discussions and empirical studies to date. To this end, the paper deals with a number of issues which are grouped into four broad categories: the essential constituents of pragmatic competence, models of pragmatic development, major processes of pragmatic competence,...

BACKGROUND Impaired social functioning has been well documented in individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Existing treatments for ADHD are effective for managing core symptoms, but have limited effectiveness at improving social skills, suggesting that social deficits in ADHD may not be directly related to core symptoms of the disorder. Language problems are also commo...

Ruffini N, D’Alessandro G, Mariani N, Pollastrelli A, Cardinali L, Cerritelli F. Variations of high frequency parameter of heart rate variability following osteopathic manipulative treatment in healthy subjects compared to control group and sham therapy: randomized control trial. Front Neurosci. 2015;9:272. doi:10.3389/fnins.2015.00272. The relationship between manipulative techniques and heart...

The phrase "pragmatic enrichment" is sometimes used in a broad sense to refer to the process in virtue of which the content conveyed by an utterance comes to include all sorts of elements which are contextually implied without being part of what the utterance literally means. In his class notes "Pragmatic Enrichment : Introduction by Examples," Chris Potts gives examples like the following: (1)...

Computationally detecting the accepting/rejecting force of an utterance in dialogue is often a complex process. In this paper we focus on a class of utterances we call pragmatic rejections, whose rejection force arises only by pragmatic means. We define the class of pragmatic rejections, present a novel corpus of such utterances, and introduce a formal model to compute what we call rejectionsby...

Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) has witnessed a growing body of research in the past two decades. One of the under-explored domains of L2 pragmatics is the role of learning strategies specifically tailored for the development of ILP knowledge. Therefore, this investigation aimed to determine the significant interlanguage pragmatic learning strategies (IPLS) used by high vs. low L2 pragmatic achi...