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Article published In:
Pragmatics of Active Social Inclusion
Edited by Yoshiko Matsumoto and Heidi E. Hamilton
[Pragmatics and Society 15:1] 2024
► pp. 122–139

Verbal play in dementia care

A longitudinal study

| National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University
Humor has been found to be used as a discourse strategy for negotiating power relations and mitigating FTAs in institutional elderly care. Drawing from two years of ethnography in two adult day centers in Taiwan, this article examines verbal play between a person living with dementia and a caregiver over time to illustrate how verbal play is used as meaningful, tailored practices for person-centered dementia care that leads to enhanced cognition and positive emotion. The caregiver’s framing of dementia care as person-centered and her laminating multiple frames of interactions to enrich communicative environments provides a fruitful approach to dementia care in institutional contexts and beyond.
Keywords: dementia, verbal play, humor, framing, adult day center, Taiwan
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Humor in institutional elderly care
  • 3.Verbal play and dementia
  • 4.The study
  • 5.Collaborative play with language(s)
    • 5.1Learning a flower name and playing with it
    • 5.2Playing with kinship terms
    • 5.3Multilingual play
    • 5.4Playing with the flower name, again!
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 December 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.23050.lin
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Lin, Shumin
2024. Power, solidarity, and sajiao in dementia care. Concentric. Studies in Linguistics 50:1 ► pp. 89 ff. DOI logo

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