The uses of overlap: Carer–child interaction involving a nine-year-old boy with auditory neuropathy

Abstract

The subject of this single case study, Ricky, is a nine-year-old boy with a profound hearing loss arising from auditory neuropathy. Despite cochlear implantation at the age of two, his receptive language skills remain very restricted and his speech is unintelligible. Techniques of interactional linguistics are used to analyse recordings of Ricky and his mother during shared book reading. Both participants display competences in managing turn-taking and overlapping talk that enable them to progress the book-reading activity, to talk spontaneously on topically related matters and also to handle issues of phonetic and linguistic repair. Instances of both competitive and non-competitive overlap reveal that Ricky has access to interactionally important prosodic skills. The study thus reinforces the need, when assessing a child’s potential to understand and use spoken language, to examine the child’s talk from an interactional perspective. It further indicates that overlapping talk is not necessarily a problem; indeed it can be part of a solution to issues of interpersonal understanding that routinely arise in the course of talk-in-interaction.

• Auditory neuropathy
• overlapping talk
• prosody
• shared book reading
• unintelligible speech

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Ricky’s family for their cooperation in this project, and for permitting wide access to the recordings. The research reported here originated in a dissertation completed by the first author as part of the MSc in Language and Communication Impairments in Children, University of Sheffield.