Managing Intersubjectivity in Aphasia

Abstract

Aphasia (an acquired language disorder) can cause significant problems with intersubjectivity (in the sense of people’s understanding of each other) during everyday conversation. On occasion, these problems go unresolved. Given that interaction and intersubjectivity are both realized sequentially, unresolved problems with intersubjectivity undermine the sequential bases for subsequent action. This study examines how the conversation partners of people with aphasia move on following unresolved problems with intersubjectivity. It analyzes interactions involving two people with aphasia and seven of their routine conversation partners. Conversation partners were found to move on by (a) contributing to the local course of action interrupted by the problematic talk or (b) contributing to a larger activity. These practices link current talk to uncompromised sequential structures, promoting the reestablishment of intersubjectivity but potentially limiting the agency of people with aphasia. Data are in Australian English.

I would like to extend sincere thanks to the people who participated in the present research for their time and generosity. I also appreciate the efforts of three anonymous reviewers. Their extremely helpful comments improved the clarity and depth of the article. Remaining deficiencies are my own. Preliminary findings of this research were presented at the “Atypical Interaction: Conversation Analysis and Communication Impairments” Conference in Sheffield, UK, June 2013.

Notes

2. ¹The present study’s focus on how conversation partners move on should not be read as suggesting that people with aphasia cannot themselves elect to move on following unresolved problems with intersubjectivity. As demonstrated by Rhys (2013), people with aphasia can actively and pragmatically decide what is worth repairing and what is not. The present focus on conversation partner practices alone is driven by their importance for promoting interactional participation for people with aphasia, and the nature of the data to hand.

3. ²Macquarie University Ethics Review Committee (Human Research) (Reference: HE26SEP2008-D06134) approved the design of this research.

4. ³Interested readers can find further details about the characteristics of their aphasia in Barnes and Ferguson (in press).

5. ⁴The subjective experience of interacting with a person with aphasia—particularly severe aphasia—is littered with thoughts about what to “let pass” and what to pursue with (often, further) repair. See also Skelt (2007), who deals with similar phenomena in interactions involving adults with acquired hearing impairment.

6. ⁵As noted previously, conversation partners may also choose not to respond at all (see, e.g., Perkins, 2003). Although this certainly does occur, the difficulties associated with systematically tracking this practice analytically would seem even more severe than receipting responses. As such, choosing not to respond to “problematic” talk was not examined in this data set (though see Extract 8 for a minimal nonvocal response).

7. ⁶Empirical investigation is required, but it seems likely that unresolved problems with intersubjectivity will also arise in interactions involving people with other types of communication disabilities and that their agency will similarly be at stake. Such agency restrictions may be more acutely felt in populations with concomitant cognitive disorders (e.g., people with dementia), who may be less able than people with aphasia to muster effective resistance.

8. ⁷For the participants in this study, one might characterize the activity at hand as “generation of research data,” even though it was collected in the course of their routine activities. It is possible that this had a quantitative or qualitative effect on the emergence or handling of unresolved problems with intersubjectivity in the recordings collected.