Linguistic recycling in typical and atypical interaction

Abstract

I present evidence that linguistic “recycling” – i.e., the redeployment of linguistic material from prior utterances during conversation – is a striking and prevalent feature not only of interaction between typical speakers, but also, and notably, of interaction involving the communication impaired. In the latter case, recycling may sometimes be used as a compensatory communicative resource when linguistic ability is compromised. Despite its prevalence, however, recycling has largely been ignored by clinical linguists. In addition to providing illustrations of linguistic recycling across a range of communication disorders, I also examine how it is subserved by phenomena such as priming, short-term memory and alignment. I subsequently argue for a shift in perspective that puts recycling at the heart of our perception of how typical and atypical interaction works, and suggest a number of potential benefits for clinical linguistics, ranging from the way we understand and analyse communication disorders to how we assess and treat them.

• Alignment
• interaction
• linguistic recycling
• memory
• priming

Notes

¹Although there is no space to discuss it here, there is now an extensive literature within the usage-based paradigm which examines the way in which language acquisition is heavily dependent on prior usage over a long time span (see Lieven & Tomasello, 2008, for an overview).

²In Conversation Analysis, this would be described as self-initiated self-repair. Schegloff (1987) also uses the term “recycling”, but in a far more restricted sense, to refer to instances of overlapping talk in which a speaker repeats the overlapped element in his subsequent turn. He refers to these as “recycled turn beginnings”.

³His free recall of information on the Rivermead Memory Test (Wilson, Cockburn, & Baddeley, 1985) was very poor, and recognition memory for verbal information was at a chance level.

⁴In the context of their work on interactive alignment discussed earlier, Pickering and Garrod (2004, p. 182) suggest that “sentence recall might actually present a reasonable analogue to production in naturalistic dialogue”.