Language, Interaction, and Frontotemporal Dementia: Reverse Engineering the Social Mind

In the past before improving technologies allowed for the direct observation of brain activity, brain damaged patients were a prime avenue for understanding language structure and inferring back to brain function. Now with the rapid developments in neuroscience, what has been discovered about the brain can inform our view of language allowing us to build hypotheses about the role particular brain regions perform in language use. Brain damaged patients thus become populations which serve as test cases. While technologies in neuroscience have improved, so has our understanding and techniques for observing and analyzing social and communicative behavior.

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) patients have right hemisphere, frontal and temporal pole atrophy which leaves their cognitive abilities intact, but their social interactions impaired and their personalities changed. The description of FTD as a pathological change in social behavior provides the motivation in this volume to apply ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approaches to the organization of patients' interactions. These approaches do more than document the disease and its effects on loved ones by revealing phenomena that can be analyzed empirically as causing systematic changes in the patients' social interactions.

This volume opens with a discussion of the frontal lobes and their expected involvement in language use and social interaction. Several chapters then use conversation analysis to examine a range of FTD social behaviors in real-world interactions both in and outside of the clinic. The remaining chapters show how the ethnomethodological approach applied throughout the book can be helpful in better understanding the neurobiology of discourse, the process of socialization, and the role of social motives and moral emotions in maintaining relationships.

Andrea W. Mates is co-author of The Interactional Instinct, with Namhee Lee, John Schumann, Anna Dina L. Joaquin, and Lisa Mikesell. Lisa Mikesell

Lisa Mikesell is the former editor of Issues in Applied Linguistics and is a postdoctoral researcher at the Semel Institute Health Services Research Center.

Michael Sean Smith is a doctoral student and is currently completing his PhD in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles