Assisting the Client in Aphasia Speech Therapy: A Sequential and Multimodal Analysis of Cueing Practices

Abstract

This paper investigates aphasia speech therapy as a particular form of institutional interaction dedicated to the recovery of language and communicative abilities in adult speakers. This specific form of social interaction involves both health and pedagogical issues, by presenting features generally observed in instructional settings. The paper investigates these features by focusing on the interactional and sequential organisation of naming activity -that is, the activity of naming a card. Through detailed analyses of participants' multimodal conduct, it is shown that this task (e.g. producing a specific linguistic item) is collaboratively accomplished. This defends a conception of the therapy as a socially situated and collaborative process, whose dynamics must be investigated taking into consideration participants' multimodal resources. By focusing in particular on the cueing practices used by the therapist in order to assist the client's word retrieval and production of the target item, the paper shows that these practices are strictly dependent on the micro-details of interaction, on the client's audible and visible conduct, and as such are incrementally and locally occasioned. It therefore highlights the active role played by the client in negotiating the assistance needed by the therapist and, more broadly, in co-constructing the therapeutic process.

Communication in Persons with Acquired Speech Impairment: The Role of Family as Language Brokers

“…He also points out the need to bring in the simultaneous actions and roles of the hearer to fully understand the interaction going on and particularly in reported speech. Apart from Goodwin’s most prominent studies in brain damage and communication (2003, 2004, 2008), there are some relevant studies on aphasic discourse analysis (Anward 2003; Laakso 2003; Merlino 2018; Oelschlaeger 1999; Perkins, 1995) and aphasic conversation analysis (Wilkinson 2015). It is outside the scope of this paper to reflect on such work due to space restrictions, but the main conclusions of such studies have been inspiring for articulating our analysis, namely the notions of collaborative participation and repair, which will be explained in the analysis section.…”