Contributions to the talk of individuals with aphasia in multiparty interactions

Background: It is an everyday occurrence that interactants with shared knowledge may contribute to the talk of others. The contribution of others has been recognised as a resource for people with aphasia, and their communicative restrictions often mean that they are accompanied by others in order to assist in medical and social encounters. Previous research has tended to be based on clinical and structured interactions rather than naturalistic conversation. Also, there has been a focus on the potential negative implications of such contributions as speaking on behalf of individuals with aphasia, with little exploration of explanations for this type of behaviour. Aims: The aim of the research presented in this paper was to describe how others contribute to the talk of five individuals with aphasia in naturalistic multiparty interactions. The paper also explores the explanatory framework that an understanding of conversational structure provides in relation to the face-work being managed in such interactions. Methods Procedures: The data comprised five multiparty interactions, each involving an individual with aphasia from stroke, a family member, and a friend in a semi-structured interview with one of the researchers. The interview interaction was designed to elicit four types of commonly occurring discourse in a naturalistic context (biographical data giving and stroke narrative as in a medical case history; personal narrative re memories of how they met as in a social interaction; and opinion giving as in a social interaction). The analysis of these data involved behavioural description of participant speaking roles that involved contributions to the talk of others: speaking instead of another, speaking on another's behalf, and speaking support. Outcomes Results: Participant speaking roles of speaking instead of, and speaking on another's behalf occurred in the interactions for all speakers, but speaking support was only observed to contribute to the talk of the aphasic speaker. The occurrence of participant speaking roles appeared to be affected by the type of discourse, in that contributions to the talk of others occurred more frequently in the giving of biographical information and personal recount. Speaking support was not provided during opinion giving. Conclusions: It is argued that rather than simply representing a face-threat in themselves, these participant speaking roles represent work by participants to reduce face-threat through the exploitation of the preference organisation of conversational structure. It is suggested that an understanding of these conversational resources provides important insights to guide clinical intervention with communication partnerships.