Halting Aphasic Interaction. Creation of Intersubjectivity and Spousal Relationship in Situ

Abstract

This article discusses a communicative phenomenon that is studied relatively little: getting stuck in an aphasic conversation. Although aphasia as a medical and linguistic condition has been widely examined, the more social and participatory aspects of the symptom are not so well-known. Aphasia forms a threat to the emergence of a shared understanding, as well as to the experience of being in the shared, i.e. intersubjective, social world. In the analysis, we closely explore how a shared understanding is constructed in the sequential organization of conversation. In our study we use two data corpora when analyzing the halting interaction. In our data, we detected two kinds of interactive halts that emerged in connection with aphasic word searching. Firstly, ‘real halts’ were caused by the aphasic person’s inability to find correct words and, on these occasions, the co-participants were also not able to resolve the problem. Secondly, ‘exam halts’ occurred when the co-participant did not provide the missing words despite knowing what the aphasic speaker was trying to say. We discuss how the phenomenon is linked with the ideas of intersubjectivity and face-work and conclude that real halts are more directly caused by the aphasic condition, whereas exam halts reflect spousal relationship in the form of face-work.

Collaboration, trouble and repair in multiparty interactions involving couples with dementia or aphasia

“…Among possible interactional practices, people with aphasia often experienced reduced ability to carry out self-repair, and consequently the conversational partner needed to take an active role in resolving troubles in interaction involving PWA (Aaltonen & Laakso, 2010;Barnes & Ferguson, 2014;Ferguson, 1993;Goodwin, 1995, Oelschlaeger & Damico, 2003. In interaction involving PWA, repair sequences were often extended over a number of turns and the degree of other involvement was higher than in typical interactions (Ferguson, 1993, Laakso & Klippi, 1999Oelschlaeger & Damico, 2003).…”

Trouble and repair during conversations of people with primary progressive aphasia

“…In contrast, repair by people with acute onset aphasia is frequently long, structurally complex and unsuccessful (Milroy & Perkins, 1992;Wilkinson, 2007) and is not accomplished as efficiently as in conversation with unimpaired participants (Booth & Perkins, 1999). Overall, to restore understanding, the conversation partners of people with acute onset aphasia are required to assume a greater role in resolving trouble (Aaltonen & Laakso, 2009;Barnes & Ferguson, 2014;Ferguson, 1994;Lindsay & Wilkinson, 1999;Milroy & Perkins, 1992) and therefore exhibit increased use of interactive TIBs to signal that communication is breaking down. Partners of people with acute onset aphasia may also employ behaviours, which are less facilitative, in spite of understanding the person with aphasia's communicative intent.…”

Conversation and aphasia: advances in analysis and intervention

“…This term refers to the first pair parts of sequences (see Schegloff, 2007), such as questions in question-answer sequences, where the response is already (at least broadly) known to the producer of the FPP. So K-R FPPs include what have been termed "test questions" (i.e., questions, such as those produced by teachers, or SLTs/pathologists, where the questioner already knows the answer) and also the production of prompts, such as phonemic cues, to elicit the production of a word or phrase (see, e.g., Aaltonen & Laakso, 2010;Bauer & Kulke, 2004;Lock et al, 2001). From interviews with the conversation partners, it would appear that motivations for the use of K-R FPPs include the conversation partners hoping that the prompted word or sentence will be easier to remember and produce on a future occasion.…”