Reviewer: Suzanne M Welty, MA, EdD, CCC (Biola University)
Description: This book serves as a comprehensive edited manual that describes the pragmatic language of 25 specific diagnoses within the categories of complex diagnoses of childhood, complex diagnoses of adulthood, and underserved populations.
Purpose: The purpose of this book is to provide speech-language pathologists and related professionals with a detailed and comprehensive reference manual on pragmatic language disorders. According to the editor, many clinical populations have been neglected in research and practice, and these populations are often underserved. There is a need for speech-language pathologists to be educated in the pragmatic language of individuals within these underserved populations in order to provide informed practice. This manual aims to be a multidisciplinary reference by including the expertise of authors within the disciplines of psychiatry, neurology, psychology, clinical linguistics, and speech-language pathology. Finally, the book compiles current research that serves as a basis for future research to be conducted on the subject of pragmatic language in each of these populations.
Audience: This book was written for speech-language pathologists, students, and related professionals. It stands as an excellent resource for master's level SLP students or faculty researchers. The editor is a professor and researcher with publications in speech-language pathology, pragmatics, and dementia. Each chapter is authored by experts in their respective fields including linguistics and psychology, providing a broad wealth of knowledge within this volume.
Features: The book includes 26 chapters that address the pragmatic abilities of specific diagnoses. The book includes numerous specific psychiatric and neurological diagnoses with one chapter per diagnosis, organized by childhood and adult disorders. In addition, the chapters on the pragmatics of underserved populations include internationally adopted children, maltreated and traumatized children and youth, incarcerated adults, individuals who use augmentative communication, and written language disorders. Each chapter describes a specific diagnosis, describes the social/pragmatic characteristics, assessment, and evidence-based practice specific to pragmatic language for each described diagnosis. In addition, each chapter includes multiple current references, which causes the book to serve as a compilation of systematic reviews on the pragmatic abilities for specific populations. Implications for further research are also addressed in many of the chapters. The book is unique in that it is a detailed compilation written by a multidisciplinary team of authors and therefore addresses diagnoses and details that are not included in most speech-language pathology texts. Because the book focuses on pragmatics rather than aiming to describe communication overall, clinicians may also need to consult other sources for descriptions, assessment, and evidence-based treatment of voice, fluency, semantics, syntax/morphology, and phonology that are specific to each of the diagnoses described.
Assessment: This book is an excellent current reference text that is unique to other available texts due to the depth of research included and the breadth of populations that are addressed. A similar book in pragmatics includes Social Communication Development and Disorders, Hwa-Froelich (Routledge, 2014), which serves as a text of pragmatic disorders and describes social communication, assessment, and treatment of more commonly seen populations. Another book, Pragmatic Impairment, Perkins (Cambridge University Press, 2008) provides an in-depth description of the theory and conceptual framework describing typical and impaired pragmatic language. Cummings, the editor of the book under review, also edited the Routledge Pragmatics Encyclopedia (Routledge, 2010) and authored Pragmatics: A Multidisciplinary Perspective (Routledge, 2005), an in-depth theoretical text describing the constructs of pragmatic language from multidisciplinary perspectives. Each of these books has purposes that differ from Cummings' current work, which stands alone as a comprehensive reference on the pragmatics of specific populations.