An Ethno-Social Approach to Code Choice in Bilinguals Living with Alzheimer’s

“Carolin Schneider asks daring questions about bilinguals living with dementia that are seldom asked and even less frequently answered – and moves not only to answer them with her case studies of ten bilinguals with DAT but also to make readers aware of the importance of the issue.” —Boyd Davis, Tongji University, China This book examines the under-researched field of communication by bilingual people living with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT). With an aging population increasingly facing neurocognitive conditions like DAT, there has been substantial growth in research, particularly focusing on monolingual DAT communication, over the past three decades. Previous studies have underscored the significance of language choice for preserving a person's sense of autonomy amidst changing communication abilities. Adding a new perspective, this book investigates how ten Puerto Rican individuals at various stages of DAT utilize their bilingual abilities in informal interactions with their primary caregivers. Through narrative interviews conducted in Orlando, Florida, this multi-case study employs an ethno-social approach that combines elements of conversation analysis and ethnography of communication. The author sheds light both on the question of how people living with DAT engage in conversations and which strategies they employ in their languages (English and Spanish) to reach their communicative goals. By qualitatively analyzing the role of code choice and code-switching, two primary functional categories emerge: discourse-related and participant-related code-switching. Individuals living with DAT adeptly navigate code choice, either through exploratory code-switching or metalinguistic commentary, underscoring the importance of conversational partners' sensitivity to their language needs in both languages. This book will be of interest to students and researchers working on dementia discourses, health communication, multilingualism and ageing, as well as bilingual/multilingual families or individuals living with dementia. Carolin Schneider is a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer in English Linguistics at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Her research areas include multilingualism, (critical) discourse analysis and interpersonal pragmatics in online and offline contexts.