Commentary — developing the comparative perspective in atypical interaction research

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Notes

¹ The formulation ‘a communication disorder or other form of communicative impairment(s)’ is used here to allow inclusion of forms of interaction such as those involving participants using sign language. While sign language is used in the context of one or more of the participants having a particular communicative impairment – i.e., a hearing impairment – it does not seem appropriate to discuss sign language as an example of a communication disorder (Wilkinson et al., 2020).

² ‘On the whole’ because this type of research can also contribute to the more general CA undertaking of investigating social actions and the practices involved in their production within talk-in-interaction (Schegloff, 2003; and see Barnes, 2012 Drew & Penn, 2016).

³ In what follows in this section, I focus on repair which is self-initiated in first position (most commonly, in the same turn as the trouble source) or other-initiated in second position (most commonly, in the turn immediately following the trouble source turn). Repair can also be self-initiated or other-initiated in a later position relative to the trouble source turn (i.e., third or fourth position respectively: see Schegloff, 1992), but since this is not relevant to the discussion here it is not described further.

⁴ For a discussion of preference in talk-in-interaction, see Pomerantz and Heritage (2013).

⁵ Kendrick (2015b) discusses evidence that other-correction may regularly be constructed without certain features common to dispreferred actions, such as delays or qualifications. He also, however, notes other-correction’s relative rarity in conversation (a feature of dispreferred actions, which tend to occur less frequently than their preferred alternatives: Levinson, 1983; Kendrick & Torreira, 2014).

⁶ The notion of ‘ordinary’, ‘typical’ or ‘normal’ conversation needs greater explication than can be provided in the current context (see Haakana et al., 2009).

⁷ Of course, comparisons within this field generally are not straightforward. One set of issues that has to be considered (see Wilkinson, 2019) concerns heterogeneity within a particular type of communication disorder, including the existence of various sub-types/variants of the disorder/condition, and different severities of the disorder (which may itself become a focus for comparison, as seen in Pajo and Laakso (2020)). The type of interactional data analysed (broadly, mundane conversation versus institutional interaction, such as therapist-client interaction) also has to be taken into consideration when comparisons are to be made. As such, the comparisons presented within the framework below should be taken as provisional findings until larger and better-matched data sets are compared.

⁸ It is not the aim here to provide an exhaustive overview of the atypical interaction literature, nor to further investigate or discuss phenomena highlighted within the framework, both of which will need further space than is available here. Also, the rather specific focus on the structural features of these sequences means that various important observations from the papers in the special issue are not further discussed here. This includes, for instance, how in response to some problematic interactional contribution from the PWCI, the co-participant may do something (including not talking) which in effect passes on the option of producing an other-initiation of repair (see Antaki et al. (2020) on interactions involving people with intellectual disabilities, Barnes (2020) on interactions involving people with right-hemisphere damage, and also Barnes and Ferguson (2015) on interactions involving people with aphasia).

⁹ Although at present there is little atypical interaction research which draws for comparative purposes on findings about the general distribution of different other-initiated repair practices in typical interaction, this is likely to change with information about the latter becoming available (e.g., Kendrick, 2015a).

¹⁰ In some cases, of course, it may be found that the most recurrent types of other-initiation of repair in the atypical interactions are reported to be similar to those found in typical interaction (see, for example, Salmenlinna and Laakso (2020) on interactions involving children with developmental language disorder).

¹¹ Perhaps most obviously, the framework presented in this current context relates only to other-initiations of repair, and does not cover features of repair activity launched via self-initiations of repair in atypical interactions. For some discussion of this distinction in atypical interaction, see Wilkinson (2019).