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. 2023 Feb 1:14:1026638.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1026638. eCollection 2023.

Older adults' refusal speech act in cognitive assessment: A multimodal pragmatic perspective

Lihe Huang  1 , Huiyu Qu  1 , Deyu Zhou  1
Affiliations

Older adults' refusal speech act in cognitive assessment: A multimodal pragmatic perspective

Lihe Huang et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

This paper explores how older adults with different cognitive abilities perform the refusal speech act in the cognitive assessment in the setting of memory clinics. The refusal speech act and its corresponding illocutionary force produced by nine Chinese older adults in the Montreal Cognitive Assessment-Basic was annotated and analyzed from a multimodal perspective. Overall, regardless of the older adults' cognitive ability, the most common discursive device to refuse is the demonstration of their inability to carry out or continue the cognitive task. Individuals with lower cognitive ability were found to perform the refusal illocutionary force (hereafter RIF) with higher frequency and degree. Additionally, under the pragmatic compensation mechanism, which is influenced by cognitive ability, multiple expression devices (including prosodic features and non-verbal acts) interact dynamically and synergistically to help older adults carry out the refusal behavior and to unfold older adults' intentional state and emotion as well. The findings indicate that both the degree and the frequency of performing the refusal speech act in the cognitive assessment are related to the cognitive ability of older adults.

Keywords: cognitive assessment; cognitive impairment; examiner-patient interaction; pragmatic compensation; refusal speech act.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
An annotated instance of the RIF, ELAN (Version 6.4) [Computer software] (2022).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Frequency distribution of the RIF in a single turn.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Average frequency of different types of prosodic features in each RIF.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Average frequency of different types of intentional states in each RIF.
Figure 5
Figure 5
The interactive mechanism of performing the RIF.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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