Intervening With Conversation Analysis in Speech and Language Therapy: Improving Aphasic Conversation

Abstract

In this review, I discuss conversation analytic informed intervention for aphasia, a language disorder acquired following brain damage. As well as describing this form of intervention and outlining features of the studies produced over the last 15 to 20 years that provide evidence of its effectiveness, I discuss some features of this approach that may be of relevance to interventionist conversation analysis more generally. Data are in British English and in Swedish with English translation.

Notes

1. ¹See Edwards (2005) for a broader discussion of “fluent aphasia” and “nonfluent aphasia” as two categories of aphasia.

2. ²Some care has to be taken in this regard since an initiation of repair cannot straightforwardly be assumed to index a particular inner state of a participant. So, for example, not all other-initiations of repair can be treated as indications of a participant’s understanding or hearing problem; some can do other actions such as marking (incipient) disagreement (Schegloff, 1997).

3. ³See Schegloff (2007) on retro-sequences and the ways in which response cries and displays of emotion such as laughter and crying can be treated by participants as indexing a source of these behaviors in the immediate context of the interaction, and in particular in the immediately preceding talk.

4. ⁴Such a series of prebeginning elements occur in a number of the postintervention examples and appear to be another means by which Connie signals that the upcoming utterance is to be heard as disjunctive from what has gone before. See Wilkinson et al. (2011) for further discussion of this phenomenon.

5. ⁵It should also be noted that many of the studies reported here provide evidence that nonaphasic participants as well as aphasic participants show change following this type of CA-informed intervention.