This study investigates the practice of achieving common understanding in aided Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). The aims are to explore whether communicative contributions can be described as turns, as defined in conversation analytic terms, and how then the contributions to the interaction can be designed. The principles and practices of Conversation Analysis (CA) were used to record, transcribe and analyse conversations between a non-speaking boy with cerebral palsy with, on different occasions, his mother, his assistant and his friend. The boy augments his communication with aided AAC, bliss symbolics. The analysis indicates that the participants can collaborately create and orient to units in interaction equivalent to turns in interaction although they differ dramatically from ordinary turns-at-talk. In order to capture the nature of the described units, the category turn-at-action is suggested. The analyses demonstrate that the boy’s turn-at-actions are oriented to as a co-constructed and thus interactionally achieved unit: the boy points at a bliss symbol which is given voice by the speaking co-participant. In and through the relevant made voicing of the turn-at-action, a turn constructional unit (TCU) emerges, and the turn-at-action is designed and oriented to as a TCU-based unit. The analysis will also show that turns can be designed as non TCU-based units. These findings may have implications for CA theory as well as for clinical intervention.
Using multi-modal Conversation Analysis (CA), this article demonstrates how teenage boys end assessments of social experiences with insults. When they participate in social activities, teenagers — as everybody else — routinely make assessments through which they produce social organization and create alignments. This article, however, analyzes structures of assessments that are contested in a counter-positional action. It will be demonstrated how the teenage boys end these challenged-assessment sequences through ‘insults’. A feature of these insults is that the conversationalists ‘go mental’, that is, they question the ‘mental’ abilities and competences of their co-participant and thereby exclude him from the status of being a competent member of the group. In and through such conduct, the participants make the social function as well as the risks of assessing explicit: as competent members of a social group (society) they are being held accountable for having claimed knowledge of the assessed target and may on these grounds be excommunicated as someone who does not understand social life.
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