Encoding location in aphasic and normal speech: The interaction of pragmatics with language output processing limitations

Background: Most pragmatic abilities are relatively preserved in aphasia, while ability to express spatial relationships is compromised. Do aphasic speakers observe the pragmatic constraint that unexpected information should be expressed while inferrable information may be omitted?Aims: Asking aphasic speakers to describe unexpected spatial arrangements on objects should produce attempts at expressing spatial information that are likely to contain errors.Methods & Procedures: A total of 16 participants with various types of aphasia and 10 controls described pictures showing expected and unexpected arrangements of furniture.Outcomes & Results: As predicted, this pragmatic manipulation of stimulus materials produced large amounts of data for analysis: Participants tried to produce elaborated descriptions of unexpected arrangements, and these efforts contained many errors. Qualitative analysis showed that these errors were not perceptual or conceptual, yet involved encoding problems much broader than “diffic...