Pragmatic skills in people with HIV/AIDS.
OBJECTIVE
Carers and health professionals who work with people with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) are reported to think that the communication skills of people with HIV are "odd" and a range of difficulties with communication have been identified. However, little research has examined the "pragmatic" skills of people with HIV.


METHODS
Five men living with AIDS were assessed on a battery of measures of componential language to exclude aphasia. Their pragmatic appropriateness as judged using the the Pragmatic Protocol was then rated by ten experienced raters from representative portions of a semi-structured interview.


RESULTS
All cases were rated by some raters as inappropriate on: Lexical selection specificity/accuracy. 4/5 cases had problems with: fluency, turn taking quantity, turn taking interruption/overlap and vocal quality. 3/5 were scored by some raters as having problems with: intelligibility, lexical selection: cohesion, prosody, turn taking pauses, turn taking repair/revision and vocal intensity.


CONCLUSIONS
Several pragmatic behaviours consistent with what might be expected in people with mild diffuse or subcortical brain impairment were clearly observed. Whilst the cause of their perceived pragmatic inappropriateness cannot be established, the results suggest that cognitive-communication problems might be a feature of language use in people with HIV-AIDS even when AIDS-related dementia has not been diagnosed.
McCabe
Patricia
P
School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Sydney, Australia. p.mccabe@fhs.usyd.edu.au
Sheard
Christine
C
Code
Chris
C
D000328:Adult; D004185:Disability Evaluation; D015658:HIV Infections / Q000150:complications* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D007407:Interviews as Topic; D007806:Language Disorders / Q000209:etiology* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D008297:Male