Problems following topic shift in interactions with repaired cleft children

Abstract

Children with a history of cleft lip and/or palate (CL/P) can experience a range of difficulties such as sound articulation errors and reduced psychosocial functioning. This causes interaction with them to contain more frequent communication breakdowns than non-cleft children. The present study shows evidence of such breakdowns involving topic shifts in the interaction between parents and their repaired CL/P children. Interactional data were obtained through a series of recordings of three parent-child sets. The process is guided by the framework of Conversation Analysis (CA) while coding of topic shift adopts Crow’s typology (1983). Findings show that topic shift during interaction can indeed cause problems for children with a history of cleft, especially involving palatal cleft. Specifically, through the children’s repair initiations, the problems are manifest when a topic is introduced once the previous topic concludes, when a topic is extended and when a topic is revisited. This study shows that topic shift can potentially be a source of problems to CL/P children. Findings are useful for speech therapists, parents and teachers.

Parents’ linguistic strategies in interaction with their children with history of cleft lip and/or palate

“…These problems are believed to be the result of linguistic constraints prior to corrective surgery such as a smaller phonetic inventory size (Morris & Ozanne, 2003), compensatory articulation (Philip et al., 2018) and limited expressive vocabulary (Sedaghati et al., 2016). Studies have also reported problems within the area of pragmatic functioning that include constant failure by the children to reply adequately and accurately to their conversational partners (Frederickson et al., 2006) and difficulty for them to follow topic shifts (Saad et al., 2020).…”

“…In addition, they also receive fewer positive responses from their peers. In another study, Saad et al (2020) documented the difficulties for repaired CL/P children to follow topic shifts which could be linked to their poor attention or cognitive functioning when they participate in everyday interaction. This is not unexpected as there has been evidence to suggest that their language and general cognitive functioning is significantly poorer than that of non-CL/P individuals (Roberts et al, 2012).…”