ASSESSING PRAGMATIC ABILITIES WITH THE BRIEF VERSION OF THE APACS TEST AND THEIR ROLE IN REASONING ABOUT CRIME

Pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. Pragmatic abilities may be selectively impaired in a wide range of clinical conditions. It is therefore of fundamental importance to account for the pragmatic deficit with valid and reliable assessment methods. Moreover, pragmatic skills are key in social communication and might shape reasoning processes in everyday life. The first study aims to demonstrate the validity and reliability of the APACS Brief test, a short instrument for pragmatic assessment. The test was administered remotely in its two parallel forms to 81 healthy subjects, together with a battery of tests that considered cognitive and formal language variables. Regression analyses confirmed a good construct validity of the test, as well as the stability demonstrated in test-retest analyses for both equal and parallel forms. Cognitive functions and vocabulary skills showed a significant correlation with pragmatic skills. The second experiment attempted to replicate the study by Thibodeau & Boroditsky (2013), which showed that metaphor frames influence reasoning about crime, and to test whether pragmatic abilities might play a role in explaining the framing effect. A subsample of 49 subjects was asked to choose solutions among two 'enforce' and two 'reform' strategies to a crime problem, Beast- or Virus-framed. Binomial linear regressions showed a marginally significant difference between the proposed frames. Specifically, subjects tended to choose more ‘reform’ strategies in the Virus-frame condition. Interestingly, a qualitative analysis showed that, when dividing the subjects on the basis of their pragmatic scores in the APACS Brief test, the ones who showed a performance below the median were more likely to choose ‘enforce’ strategies in the Beast-frame condition, indicating that poor pragmatic skills may lead to a vulnerability to certain frames. Overall, this thesis sheds some light on the clinical and social implications of using a short, remotely administered instrument for pragmatic assessment.