Thesis (M. Phil.)--Hong Kong Baptist University, 2004. / Thesis submitted to the Dept. of Chinese Language and Literature. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 388-391).

Traumatic brain injury causes physical, neurobehavioral, and cognitive-linguistic deficits including problems related to pragmatic functioning and emotional processing. This study investigated the ability of 10 (9 male and 1 female) adults with traumatic brain injury and 10 neurotypical participants to identify errors in pragmatic behavior embedded in 25 videotaped interactions presented by computer. Statistical analysis revealed that the neurotypical participants identified significantly more violations of pragmatic rules than the participants with traumatic brain injury for two of the five deficit categories, excessive interruption and two deficits. Limitations of the study and directions for future research are discussed. / text

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Thesis (M.A.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 111-117).

Thesis--Wisconsin. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 77-81).

published_or_final_version / Psychiatry / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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This thesis focusses on variability in audience interpretation of a television programme, and aims to problematise and investigate the reception of broadcast communication by applying the pragmatic theory of relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1966) to an empirical study of audience response. This aim is achieved using the following method: In Chapter Two I consider the scope of pragmatic theories of inferencing and conclude that relevance theory offers the only account which can both accommodate and provide the basis for an explanation of variation in interpretation. I also assert that for relevance theory to be able to show why an audience interprets a text in a specific way the cultural background of that audience has to be considered. In Chapter Three I show how existing studies of audience response which adopt a critical cultural studies approach require a more sophisticated model of communication than they currently assume if they are to realise their aim of relating audience respo nse to socio-political structures. My contention is that the inferential model proposed by Sperber and Wilson can provide such an account. Chapters Four and Five describe, and report the results of, an empirical study I carry out based on a methodology premised on relevance theory. The study consists of two separate interviews with audiences who have distinct cultural backgrounds in each of which I show a video recording of a television programme and then question the interviewees on their understanding of the text of the programme. In Chapters Six and Seven I discuss the results of the study in relation to relevance theory and media studies. The results of my study indicate that a methodology based on relevance theory can make explicit, and show the significance of, processes involved in audience interpretation of a media text which have not previously been open to analysis. Building on Sperber and Wilson's claim (1986: 15) that the context of an utterance is a psychological construct, and is a sub-set of the set of assumptions available to the hearer of a given utterance, the results make explicit (a) relevant aspects of the encyclopaedic knowledge of two distinct audiences; (b) the contexts these audiences produce in response to a television text; (c) how these contexts are related to the audience's encyclopaedic knowledge; (d) how these contexts affect the disambiguation and enrichment of information linguistically encoded in the text (e) 'The contextual implications, or interpretations, -the audience draw from a synthesis of the information encoded in text and the contexts the audiences apply. My findings are particularly pertinent for the critical cultural approach to audience studies as they indicate how it is possible to make explicit the relationship between response and cultural background by showing how the existing knowledge of an audience affects interpretation and indicating moreover how this knowledge can be related to social determinants. The results of my study also contribute to pragmatic theory in that they show how relevance theory can be used to explain why interpretation may vary.

Thesis (M. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

This study investigated the effectiveness of explicit pragmatic instruction on the acquisition of requests by college-level English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners in Taiwan. The researcher applied quantitative and qualitative approaches to determine first whether the use of explicit pragmatic instruction had a positive effect on EFL learners’ pragmatic competence. Second, the relative effectiveness of presenting pragmatics through two delivery systems—face-to-face, in-class activities and computer-mediated communication (CMC) via e-mail and WebCT—was compared. One hundred and eighteen Taiwanese undergraduate students who made up three intact classes in an “English for Tourism” course completed the entire study. The three groups were: (1) the control group, in which students received no explicit instruction on pragmatics but received instructor-led lessons from the textbook’s teacher’s manual, (2) the experimental/Teacher Instruction (TI) group, in which students learned pragmatics in a face-to-face classroom setting with explicit instruction on pragmatics, and (3) the experimental/CMC group, in which students learned pragmatics explicitly through e-mail and WebCT discussions with their partners at Texas A&M University. There were 40 Taiwanese students in the control group, 36 Taiwanese students in the experimental/Teacher Instruction group and 42 Taiwanese students in the experimental/CMC group. Treatment types (Control/TI/CMC) were randomly assigned to the intact classes. The results showed that explicit pragmatic instruction had a positive impact on the EFL learners in both the Teacher Instruction and CMC groups. Learners who received explicit pragmatic instruction performed better on the Discourse Completion Task posttest than those who did not. The findings also indicated that technology can be a valuable tool for delivering pragmatics instruction.