A conversation analytic view of continuous discourse tracking as a rehabilitative tool

Abstract

Abstract

Objective: With increasing focus on the consequences of aural rehabilitation for the everyday conversational difficulties arising from adult acquired hearing impairment, this study aimed to compare patterns of repair behaviour arising in conversation and a widely used aural rehabilitation tool, continuous discourse tracking (), in order to better understand the procedure’s role in the assessment and training of repair behaviour. Design: A parallel case study design was adopted. Communication dyads undertook a 20-minute conversation followed by a 20-minute session of tracking. The interactions were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analysed for patterns of repair according to current conversation analytic conventions (). The research questions were addressed via both qualitative and quantitative methods. Study sample: Three communication pairs (dyads), each comprising an adult with acquired hearing impairment and their chosen familiar communication partner, participated in this study. Results: Analysis revealed that patterns of repair were constrained by the task requirement in tracking for the receiver/hearing-impaired adult to repeat text segments spoken by the sender/familiar communication partner with 100% accuracy. Conclusions: Whilst tracking has a number of useful conversational qualities, it may have only limited ecological validity when applied to the evaluation and training of repair behaviour.

Key Words::

• Hearing impairment
• tracking
• conversation repair
• aural rehabilitation
• ecological validity
• generalization
• Conversation Analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology at FMC for their assistance in the recruitment of participants for this study. Thanks also to Lisa Rodgers, Jenna Golab, Erin Parker, and Natalie Williams for their assistance with transcription.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no declarations of interest.

Notes

1. In this paper, the term miscommunication denotes breakdowns in mutual understanding that are overtly noted by participants in dyadic interactions. Miscommunications may occur as a consequence of mishearing or misunderstanding of the linguistic referent(s) or pragmatic intent of an utterance (Clark & Schaefer, 1987; Schegloff, 1992; Schegloff et al, 1977). The term does not attribute error, blame, or communicative incompetence to one or another participant; rather it is used to describe instances of negotiated understanding (Schegloff, 1992; Schegloff et al, 1977).

2. The term ‘repair’ denotes any actions undertaken by participants to resolve miscommunications that result in breakdowns in mutual ongoing understanding (Schegloff, 1992; Schegloff et al, 1977).

3. For the purposes of this paper, the terms ‘sender’ and ‘receiver’ in tracking will be used to refer to the speaker and the recipient of a given text segment, respectively. In the context of conversation, the speaker of a given turn will be referred to as the ‘speaker’ and the participant who is the recipient of this turn will be referred to as the ‘listener’.

4. All transcribers received training in CA methods for the transcription and analysis of conversation samples.

5. For the purposes of this study, qualitative analysis was limited to the first three turns of tracking repair sequences (turns a, b, and c of the sequence outlined above) as it is these turns that are relevant to the identification of repairs as either sender-or receiver-initiated.

6. Note that there are two potential sources of trouble in the HI adult’s response in line 2 ((/stefdi/) as well as ‘with a’). However, only one (‘with a’) is treated as an error by the FCP in their subsequent repair turn. Therefore, in keeping with the next-turn proof procedure, the authors also did not consider (/stefdi/) as an error in their analysis of this sequence.

Appendix

Extract 1. An other-initiated self-repair sequence (from Schegloff et al (1977), p. 367)

Extract 2. A third position repair sequence (from Lind (2009), p. 226)

Extract 3. Dyad 3 tracking repair sequence: ‘HI adult response: whole repetition + incorrect + falling intonation → FCP repair: incorrect portion + remaining text (entails partial repetition of text segment).’

Extract 4. Dyad 1 tracking repair sequence: ‘HI adult response: no verbal response → FCP repair: whole repetition.’

Extract 5. Dyad 2 tracking repair sequence: ‘HI adult response: partial repetition + correct + rising intonation → FCP repair: repetition of missed portion (entails partial repetition of text segment).’

Extract 6. Dyad 3 tracking repair sequence: ‘HI adult response: partial repetition + incorrect + falling intonation → FCP repair: repetition of incorrect portion + missed portion (entails partial repetition of text segment).’