Individual and social approaches Flashcards
What are the features of the communication chain?
- focus on the individual speaker, their intention, and how their intention is converted into speech
- little focus on listener
- no inclusion of non-verbal behaviour
- at most a 2 person party, not multiparty
What is conversation analysis (CA)?
- an approach to the analysis of natural human social interaction, particularly in conversation
- emerged from sociology in 1960s and 70s
- based on the analysis of naturally occurring social interaction
What is the purpose of CA?
to uncover social rules/conventions that ppts in interactions need to follow to make their contributions understandable and ‘normal’
What are the features of the rules identified by CA?
- rules we all follow which have mostly been picked up without being explicitly taught them
- we are largely unaware of these rules
- tend to notice if others don’t follow them and make subsequent inferences about the speaker
What are the main stages of methodology in CA?
- data collection
- data transcription
- data analysis
What is the data collection stage of CA?
- collect naturally occurring behaviour
- non-verbal as well as verbal
- video or audio recordings taken
- often conversation, but can be any form of social interaction
What is the data transcription stage of CA?
- use a set of transcription symbols
- attempts to try to capture exactly how talk sounds, including silences and overlap
- non-verbal communication can also be captured
What is the data analysis stage of CA?
use recording and transcript to uncover systematic features of conversation/social interaction
What are the four areas of focus in CA?
- actions and sequence of actions
- epistemics
- turns and turn taking organisation
- repair organisation
What is the most important part for a listener within an interaction?
the speakers action
What is the job of listeners in an interaction?
Action ascription - need to work out the action of the speaker as it will have implications for how they should respond in their turn
What is the job of speakers within an interaction?
Action formation - constructing their turn in a way so that the listener will interpret which action they are conveying
What pattern does action sequence usually follow?
adjacency pairs
What is sequence organisation?
the ways in which actions are carried out through a sequence of turns
What are the features of adjacency pairs?
- composed of two turns
- different speakers
- usually adjacently paired
- relatively ordered (FPP then SPP)
- pair typed
What is an FPP?
first pair part
What is an SPP?
second pair part
When does an SPP become conditionally relevant?
when a FPP is produced
What happens if an SPP is not produced?
- notable absence
- listeners will draw inferences about what the lack of response ‘means’
How can answering indirectly occur?
- whatever is done after an FPP is inferred if possible as an SPP, or on the way to producing an SPP
- allows answering indirectly, as meaning is read into the response
What has studying actions highlighted?
- importance of speakers and listeners to consider utterances within their sequential context
- what one speaker says influences what the next will say
How can actions be applied to communication disorders?
applying what we know about ‘typical’ conversation to conversations with ‘atypical’ speakers allows us to see exactly how these conversations are different
Define epstemics
claims to knowledge that ppts in the interaction may (often implicitly) assert, contest, and defend
Define epistemic status
what ppts assume eachother to know, including who is more knowledgeable (K+) and less knowledgeable (K-) about the issue under discussion
Define epistemic stance
the expression of knowledge claim through design of talk
How can K+ and K- influence interactions?
can influence how recipients perceive the type of action the speaker is performing (e.g. a statement can be heard as a question if listener is K+ to speaker)
How is research into epistemics important in studying communication disorders?
allows us to investigate how issues of knowledge and memory are not just static possession of an individual in their mind/brain, but how these are relevant to ppts in interactions
What are test questions?
questions which show discrepancy between epistemic stance and status (evident that the questioner already knows the answer)
How is epistemics different in conversations with individuals with communication disorders?
Test questions are not often used in typical conversation, but are used frequently in conversations with individuals with communication disorders
What needs to be solved in every interaction (Schegloff, 2006)?
how it is decided who will act/talk/gesture next
What is conversation made up of?
TCUs
What is a TCU?
turn constructional unit
How do TCUs relate to individual speakers?
- everyone is entitled to just one in the first instance
- have a right and a responsibility to complete it
What are the main types of TCU?
- lexical - one word
- phrasal/clausal - a complete unit which is more than a word and less than a sentence
- sential - a whole sentence
How much of talk is overlapping?
5%
How do we know that one at a time is a rule?
- children learn it
- overlap is often treated as interruption
- silence is often uncomfortable
What does it mean for TCU to have predictability?
listeners can predict the possible end of the TCU using syntax, prosody, pragmatics, gaze
What is a TRP?
- transition relevant place
- the place where a TCU can end
- at this point, speaker may stop and next speaker start with no gaps/overlap by the next speaker predicting where the TRP is and starting at that point
Why is studying turn taking useful for looking at communication disorders?
- imp for examining language in a social interaction
- look at what type of language TCU made up of
- see if speaker reaches TRP as they should
(e.g. dementia patients may not complete their TCU or reach their TRP)
Define repair
interactional practices by which ppts identify and deal with troubles in speaking/hearing/understanding
Define repair initiation
identifying one aspect of the talk as a trouble
Define self
the person whose talk contains the trouble source
Define other
a person other than the one whose talk contains the trouble source
Define other
a person other than whose talk contains the trouble source
Define trouble/trouble source
the element of talk that the repair initiation highlights as problematic, which gets worked on or changed by the repair
What is self initiated repair?
where the speaker indicates that there is a trouble with their own talk
How is self-initiated repair usually indicated?
- ‘uhm’ and/or pause indicating word search
- a cut off of a word being produced, indicating a problem with that turn/word
What is the most common type of repair?
self initiated self repair
When does other initiated repair usually occur?
- in the turn following the trouble source turn
- to display a problem of hearing or understanding
How does repair usually differ for someone with aphasia?
conversations may be noticeable by the significant amount of repair they contain
