Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics on 11/11/19, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02699206.2019.1680734
Accepted author manuscript, 1.25 MB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - To initiate repair or not?
T2 - Coping with difficulties in the talk of adults with intellectual disabilities
AU - Antaki, Charles
AU - Chinn, Deborah
AU - Walton, Chris
AU - Finlay, W.M.L.
AU - Sempik, Joe
N1 - This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics on 11/11/19, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02699206.2019.1680734
PY - 2020/10/1
Y1 - 2020/10/1
N2 - How do health and social care professionals deal with undecipherable talk produced by adults with intellectual disabilities (ID)? Some of their practices are familiar from the other-initiated repair canon. But some practices seem designed for, or at least responsive to, the needs of the institutional task at hand, rather than those of difficult-to-understand conversational partners. One such practice is to reduce the likelihood of the person with ID issuing any but the least repair-likely utterances, or indeed having to speak at all. If they do produce a repairable turn, then, as foreshadowed by earlier work on conversations with people with aphasia, their interlocutors may overlook its deficiencies, respond only minimally, simply pass up taking a turn, or deal with it discreetly with an embedded repair. When the interlocutor does call for a repair, they will tend to offer candidate understandings built from comparatively flimsy evidence in the ID speaker’s utterance. Open-class repair initiators are reserved for utterances with the least evidence to go on, and the greatest projection of a response from the interlocutor. We reflect on what this tells us about the dilemma facing those who support people with intellectual disabilities.
AB - How do health and social care professionals deal with undecipherable talk produced by adults with intellectual disabilities (ID)? Some of their practices are familiar from the other-initiated repair canon. But some practices seem designed for, or at least responsive to, the needs of the institutional task at hand, rather than those of difficult-to-understand conversational partners. One such practice is to reduce the likelihood of the person with ID issuing any but the least repair-likely utterances, or indeed having to speak at all. If they do produce a repairable turn, then, as foreshadowed by earlier work on conversations with people with aphasia, their interlocutors may overlook its deficiencies, respond only minimally, simply pass up taking a turn, or deal with it discreetly with an embedded repair. When the interlocutor does call for a repair, they will tend to offer candidate understandings built from comparatively flimsy evidence in the ID speaker’s utterance. Open-class repair initiators are reserved for utterances with the least evidence to go on, and the greatest projection of a response from the interlocutor. We reflect on what this tells us about the dilemma facing those who support people with intellectual disabilities.
KW - Conversation Analysis
KW - atypical communication
KW - repair
U2 - 10.1080/02699206.2019.1680734
DO - 10.1080/02699206.2019.1680734
M3 - Journal article
VL - 34
SP - 954
EP - 976
JO - Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics
JF - Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics
SN - 0269-9206
IS - 10-11
ER -