Prosody as a compensatory strategy in the conversations of people with agrammatism

Abstract

Historically, agrammatism, a symptom of Broca's aphasia, has been associated with dysprosody, on account of speakers' slow, halting, and effortful speech. Almost all investigations of this phenomenon use experimental methods (reading, repetition). Thus, little is known about how prosody is used by speakers with agrammatism and understood by their interlocutors in everyday conversations. This paper takes an interactional approach to prosody, using Conversation Analysis to explore everyday conversations between three speakers with agrammatism and their family members/friends, recorded in the home. A distinct prosodic pattern is revealed in their talk, whereby non‐final words in an agrammatic utterance are produced with mid‐level or minor rising pitch, and final words with a prominent pitch excursion. The analysis shows that conversation partners orient to terminal pitch movement as a signal of turn completion. Conversely, they do not take the floor when pitch signals continuation, despite significant pausing and severe grammatical disruption. Thus, prosody appears to function to regulate turn taking in the same way as it does in typical (non‐language disordered) conversation. For these three speakers, intact prosodic skills appear to compensate for impaired grammatical ability, by packaging a series of haltingly produced words into an utterance, the meaning of which is responded to by the conversation partner as the sum of its agrammatic parts.

• Agrammatic aphasia
• conversation analysis
• prosody
• interaction
• intonation

Notes

1. Defined by Danly and Shapiro (1982) as a localized 5–20‐Hz increase in F₀ just prior to a syntactic boundary.

2. Both Connie and Roy used a JVC VHS‐C camcorder, whereas Donald used a Panasonic NV‐DS60B digital camcorder. In order to minimize the intrusion of equipment into everyday interaction, a decision was made to use the camera's internal microphone for sound recording purposes. Participants were not fitted with microphones.

3. Note, all names of participants are pseudonyms, as are the names of any people or places referred to in the conversation data.

4. SFS/Windows is a tool for speech analysis developed by Dr Mark Huckvale, Department of Phonetics & Linguistics, University College London. http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/resource/sfs/

5. There are only two syllables in the second version; he actually says “mazing”.