Verbosity, traumatic brain injury, and conversation: A preliminary investigation

ABSTRACT

Background

Cognitive-communication disorders resulting from traumatic brain injury may cause speakers to produce excessive verbal output, i.e., to be verbose. There is little evidence on the specific behaviours through which speakers achieve verbosity in conversation. Specifying verbosity-related behaviours can provide an improved basis for diagnosis, treatment, and measuring change in communication over the course of recovery.

Aims

This study explores whether people with verbosity caused by traumatic brain injury adopt behaviours that violate the normative organisation of turn-taking in conversation.

Methods & Procedures

Using conversation analysis, this study examines 1 hour and 40 minutes of conversations involving two participants with cognitive communication disorders characterised by verbosity following severe traumatic brain injury.

Outcomes & Results

Overlapping talk, self-initiated self-repair, parenthetical inserts, and practices for turn continuation are identified as candidate signs of verbosity. There is also evidence that verbose speakers employ practices to manage topical discontinuity caused by verbosity.

Conclusions

Verbose behaviour involves a complex interplay between cognitive impairment, communicative activity, and the communicative environment. Clinical measures for verbosity should be developed with reference to empirical findings about typical conversation.

KEYWORDS:

• Traumatic brain injury
• cognitive-communication disorder
• conversation
• assessment

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the participants. We also wish to acknowledge the contribution of Natalie Skinner to data transcription.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest were reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Verbosity is not uniquely associated with cognitive-communication disorders caused by TBI. For instance, some people with fluent aphasia (e.g., see Ferguson, 1998) and healthy elderly people (e.g., see Arbuckle et al., 2004) have been described as verbose.

2. Caroline’s choice of wh-word in her other-initiation of repair is somewhat unusual in that Annie is referring to a place, making where a more fitted choice than who. This may reflect the fact that the place has a personal name (i.e., Jasper) or it may be the case that she is targeting the person reference the four of us/we (however, this analysis is not supported by the fact that Caroline offers the place name as a candidate understanding in her second other-initiation of repair at line 23). It is also possible that Caroline’s who is designed to be a playful joke, exploiting the fact that it is both a place and personal name, which Annie does not take up, and Caroline then abandons with her second other-initiation.

3. Whether this is the fact that they attended her wedding, or the fact that her niece has herself now had a baby, is not quite clear.

4. Arguably, Gemma is referring to looking things up online, or finding a way to recall something she’s forgotten. However, the subsequent telling does not concern looking things up online, and there always being a way to find things out is not consistent with it being not uncommon. So, this generalised assertion, too, seems to be dealing with the exit from or transition between topically-diverse talk.

5. There is another it’s like TCU beginning at line 13. However, this one is much more limited in scope, and perhaps indicative of reported speech. As such, it does not constitute an example of the practices in focus for Extract 5.

Additional information

Funding

This research received in-kind support from Royal Rehab, Sydney, Australia.