Atypical Interaction: Conversation Analysis and Communicative Impairments

ABSTRACT

In this article I review conversation analytic work on “atypical interaction”—social interactions where a participant has a communicative impairment. Drawing together some of the main themes and findings in the field, I highlight three forms of atypicality in these interactions, with each linked to more than one type of communicative impairment: (a) atypical forms of delay in TCU progressivity; (b) atypical problems of understandability, intelligibility, and hearing; and (c) atypical actions. I also discuss forms of atypicality that appear to arise from one or more participants adapting their talk or conduct to deal with the impact of the impairment within interaction. The article concludes with some considerations of directions that future work in this field might take. Data are in British and Australian English.

Notes

¹ While it is analytically useful to separate out disorders in this way, an individual can of course present with impairments across various areas, and such a situation is not at all uncommon. For example, following a stroke, a person may have both aphasia and dysarthria, as well as an age-related hearing loss that was present prior to the stroke.

² In the case of aphasia, for example, types include Broca’s aphasia, Wernicke’s aphasia, anomic aphasia, and global aphasia, each of which (at least in their “pure” forms) differ significantly from the others in their patterns of linguistic impairments. Impairments such as anomia (difficulty accessing lexical items) can occur across different types of aphasia.

³ For conversation analytic research on preference, see Pomerantz and Heritage (2013).

⁴ Compared to aphasia, there is far less research on problems with lexical retrieval in children with developmental language impairments. Radford’s (2009) study provides examples of the ways in which lexical retrieval problems in this population can delay the progressivity of TCUs.

⁵ There is not space here to discuss repair initiated in third and fourth position, but for discussion of examples where a person with aphasia’s talk is the source of a misunderstanding, as highlighted by repair initiated in third or fourth position, see Wilkinson (1999).

⁶ A similar sequential configuration can be seen in other types of “nonfluent” aphasia (Kent, 2004) such as that evident in Chil, a man with aphasia whose conversations were examined by Goodwin across a number of studies (e.g., Goodwin, 1995). Chil’s nonfluent aphasia was of a more severe kind that the agrammatic form seen in Example 3, with his lexical resources limited to three words (yes, no, and and). A common sequence pattern in these conversations was that following Chil’s turn, a co-participant would produce a guess/understanding check of what they thought Chil was trying to convey in his turn, with Chil then confirming or rejecting that proposed understanding.

⁷ Hearing impairment is different in this regard in that it impacts the conversation in the form of other-initiations of repair.

⁸ Drawing on Schegloff’s (2007) definition of the constraint on telling, the constraint, or an aspect of the constraint, on requesting information that is not being adhered to in such a situation can be formulated as “a speaker should not request from a recipient information which that recipient has already provided them with or which otherwise they should be expected to know.” See also Heritage (1984, p. 250), who states that “a questioner … proposes through the production of a question to be ‘uninformed’ about the substance of the question.”

⁹ The focus here will be on adaptations that the participants appear to spontaneously develop (i.e., not as the result of teaching or intervention by health professionals). While there is not space for discussion here (but see Wilkinson, 2013b), it can be noted that the use of sign language by people with hearing impairment (McCleary & Leite, 2013) or of high-tech augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) by people with dysarthria (Engelke & Higginbotham, 2013) constitute more formally implemented adaptive methods of interaction.

¹⁰ “Telegraphic speech” is a linguistically simplified form of utterance design produced by aphasic speakers with agrammatism in which function words and affixes may be omitted.

¹¹ Other studies of aphasia have shown how people with aphasia can use gesture as an adaptive resource in interaction (Auer & Bauer, 2011; Klippi, 2015), sometimes combining it with certain forms of talk such as direct reported speech to “enact” aspects of events rather than relying on verbal description (Wilkinson, Beeke, & Maxim, 2010).

¹² It is worth noting in relation to Extract 8 that in the context of what the participants have discussed (including prior to this extract starting), it seems that Sheila’s utterance in line 35 is hearable as an expression of “ritualized disbelief’” (Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 2006) rather than a display of problematic understanding (Bloch, 2005).

¹³ In many instances of atypical conversation, the regular occurrence of repair and orientations toward inapposite talk/conduct can mean that accountings are also a recurrent feature of the conversations, particularly by the PWCI. See, for example, Extract 1, line 07 (“tch! what’s the word”); Extract 5, line 11 (“sorry”); Extract 6, line 05 (“oh bloody hell. I keep forgetting that I know”); Extract 7, line 08 (“I just want to go through it again”).

Additional information

Funding

My research into and considerations on atypical interaction have been significantly assisted by a Research Fellowship Award from the UK Economic and Social Research Council (RES-063-27-0144: “Reconsidering Aphasia and Other Communication Disorders Using an Interactional Approach”) between 2008 and 2011.