[lg policy] Policies toward Language Impairment?

[Gareth Price]

Thanks, Hal, for the article on primary progressive aphasia (PPA). It will
be very useful for my introduction to linguistics class, as a lot of my
students are medicine/bioscience/neuroscience majors who take intro to
lingiustics as a humanities requirement, but find language pathology far
more interesting than, say, allophones (at least initially, until they
realise that they can't understand some forms of aphasia without having a
basic understanding of phonology, or syntax).

But this article got me thinking about language policy more specifically.
I'm not familiar with (and perhaps there doesn't exist) much literature on
the policy implications - social, health, public etc. - for people who have
language or cognitive impairments such as PPA, alzheimer's and so on.
There's been some work on language and mental health disorders such as
schizophrenia (though usually more concerned with analysing the
manifestation of psychological disturbance in language production), but I'm
not aware of how this has been (or could?) be theorised from a language
policy perspective. I guess the closest analogy - but an imperfect one -
might be policy towards sign language speakers, with the obvious difference
being deafness is not always (or even usually) the result of cognitive
impairment.

I'd be interested to hear any thoughts on this as a point of discussion,
whether others are familiar with literature dealing with these issues, and
possibly for getting some plans together for (further?) research in this
area.

Best,

Gareth

-- 
Dr. Gareth Price
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies
316 Languages Building, Box 90259
Duke University
Durham, NC 27708-0259
USA
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