How do mothers and hearing-impaired children interact? Some conflicts in interpretation of research so far

Abstract

152 conversational ability which goes beyond a descriptive analysis of wellformed exchanges to an investigation of how conversations are initiated and sustained. One way of tackling this issue is to study samples of conversational incompetence. The present paper presents data from a ten-year-old boy in a special language school, whose conversations have been described as 'bizarre'. On the basis of these samples, a model of conversation is constructed which includes an interactional component, accounting for the well-formedness of reciprocally related utterances, and a transactional component, which accounts for the structuring and presentation of communicative information.