Abstract
Wilkinson, Rae and Rasmussen provide a thorough, state-of-the-art Introduction to the growing field of Atypical Interaction, that is, conversations and other types of social interaction where one of the participants has a communicative impairment or communication disorder. These can include, for example, autism, dementia, learning disability, stammering or hearing impairment. The authors discuss how within this field the method of conversation analysis is used to record, transcribe and analyse these types of social interaction. They describe similarities and differences in the way that the different forms of communicative impairment can impact on social interaction, and they summarise the contribution that work in this areas has made to both communication disorder research and conversation analysis research on the nature of talk and social interaction.
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Notes
- 1.
A note on terminology. The field of communicative impairments/communication disorders is one which has been the focus of attention from a number of different disciplines, with medicine (including psychiatry), psychology (including neuropsychology, clinical psychology and developmental psychology), linguistics, and speech pathology and therapy being among those which have had most influence on the field. While social science perspectives, such as that in the current volume, have perhaps been less in evidence historically, this has changed somewhat in recent years, with, for example, the social model of disability (Shakespeare 1998) becoming influential. Overall, therefore, there is a wide range of perspectives and terminology within the field. The approach in this volume is primarily a descriptive one, aiming to capture aspects of the talk and other interactional conduct of the participants in these interactions, while at the same time retaining an awareness that at least one of the participants has a particular condition or conditions which are impacting on their talk and/or conduct. In the vast majority of cases, these conditions will have been assessed or diagnosed by a medical or other professional. The interactions here are ‘atypical’ in that they display differences in systematic ways to the practices that have been described by conversation analysts in relation to ‘typical’ interaction (i.e. here, in people without communicative impairments). We use the term ‘impairment’ to refer to aspects of the condition which impact on talk and interaction. These can be, for example, linguistic, cognitive, motor or sensory in nature and are often only evident in mundane interaction through their impact on talk or conduct. The term is not used here in the sense of the talk/conduct being ‘impaired’. To take one example: the use of sign language is ‘atypical’ in that its use of the visual-manual channel as the primary mode of communication makes it different from spoken talk, the most common form of human face-to-face communication, which uses the auditory-vocal channel. While sign language is by no means an ‘impaired’ form of communication, it can be used when the person has a hearing impairment (see Girard-Groeber, this volume).
- 2.
- 3.
For further details of the development of CA, see Schegloff (1992a).
- 4.
The term ‘talk-in-interaction’ is used to refer to talk within social interaction generally, thus including both conversation and institutional interaction (Schegloff 2007).
- 5.
For an outline of conversation analytic work on ‘preference’ see Pomerantz and Heritage (2013).
- 6.
A related strand of ethnomethodologically-inspired work on communicative impairments and disability more generally should also be noted here. See, for example, work on interactions between children with severe learning disabilities and their family members (e.g. Pollner and McDonald-Wikler 1985; Goode 1994), and Robillard (1999) on the lived experience of motor neurone disease. For reflections on ethnomethodological studies of disability, see Goode (2003).
- 7.
While this difficulty with pragmatics appears to be a central feature of the communication problems of people with these conditions, in many cases other aspects of language (such as lexis and grammar) or speech may also be affected.
- 8.
- 9.
It is important to keep in mind that not every trouble source in the talk of people with communicative impairments will necessarily be linked to those impairments (cf. Schegloff 2003). As is evident in the talk of typical speakers, repair can be initiated for a number of reasons, not all of which are to do with errors or infelicities in talk (Schegloff et al. 1977).
- 10.
- 11.
It appears that these ways of talking and conducting oneself are not always consciously adopted by the participants (Heeschen and Schegloff 1999).
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Wilkinson, R., Rae, J.P., Rasmussen, G. (2020). Atypical Interaction: An Introduction. In: Wilkinson, R., Rae, J.P., Rasmussen, G. (eds) Atypical Interaction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28799-3_1
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