Requests to children by parents with aphasia

ABSTRACT

Background

With an increasing number of young adult stroke survivors, there is a specific need to investigate how aphasia affects parenting. Raising a child happens through interaction, and centrally involves requests, such as ‘go to bed’, and ‘sit still’. Aphasia may impede participation in interaction and thus potentially also the possibilities to make requests to children and – from a wider perspective – do parenting.

Aims

This study aims to explore practices employed by parents with aphasia to ask their children to do or to stop an action during everyday interactions (e.g. mealtimes, games). The design of requests is systematically examined to shed light on the way deontic authority (the right to direct another person’s future action) is displayed by parents with aphasia.

Methods & Procedures

Using conversation analysis (CA), we carried out a collection-based study of 46 request sequences in 10 hours of video recordings involving three parents with aphasia (two with mild and one with severe aphasia).

Outcomes & Results

Stopping a child’s action may be easier to achieve than getting a child to do something, as it requires less specification of the action. Furthermore, the severity of aphasia may limit the fine-tuning of deontic authority. The persons with mild aphasia adjust the degree of authority for example by adding mitigating words, such as ‘a bit’. The person with severe aphasia uses requests that mostly show unmitigated authority for example by using higher volume. Structured contexts, such as games and mealtimes, may offer resources for all three parents with aphasia because they provide scaffolded interaction.

Conclusions

The analysis offers insights into practices that may allow or hinder these parents with aphasia to perform requests and thus to engage in parenting and participate in family life. Our findings suggest that people with aphasia could benefit from training to implement activities such as requesting in rehabilitation.

KEYWORDS:

• parents with aphasia
• requests
• directives
• deontic authority
• conversation analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Prof. Dr Auer and Dr Angelika Bauer for providing access to the data of the research project Adaptationsstrategien in der familiären Kommunikation zwischen Aphasikern und ihren Partnerinnen (2000 - 2005) (Adaption strategies in familial communication between aphasics and their partners). Furthermore, we would like to thank the Conversation Analysis and Interaction Linguistics research group at the University of Oslo for their input during data sessions.

Funding details

The research has been carried out as part of a PhD scholarship by the first author funded by the Faculty of Humanities, University Oslo, Norway. The PhD fellow and the second author are affiliated with the Center of Multilingualism Across the Lifespan, University of Oslo, funded by the Research Council of Norway, grant number 223265.

Declaration of interest statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Recruitments of assistance (“Could you open this bottle?”) (Kendrick & Drew, 2016) and requests for material objects (“Could you pass me the bread?) (Kent & Kendrick, 2016) are excluded from the analysis because they attempt to mobilize a requestee’s help. In such cases, a requestee executes an action for the requester and becomes “an extended arm” for them..

2 In this study we analyse data from the same individual as Auer and Bauer (2009). The participant called “Norbert” here is called “HC” in their study..

3 For further information about the data see Bauer (2009).

4 Diagnosed with the Aachener Aphasie Test (AAT) (Huber et al., 1983).

5 Note that “so” has different functions in German due to the sequential placement and the intonation. While “so” was used as an instructive request in Extract 2 (equivalent to “like this”), here it is used as a discourse marker (equivalent to “well”).