Assessing conversational disability

Abstract

In spite of current interest in conversational disability, and the growing number of children who are being diagnosed as exhibiting this disorder, there are few satisfactory procedures that can be used to assess their conversation. In the following paper, data from the naturally occurring conversations of two children, who were identified as having difficulties in participating in conversation, are presented. The data were scanned for the following conversational skills: securing the attention of the addressee before speaking, initiating new topics of conversation effectively, using the grammatical forms that are most frequently associated with particular linguistic functions, filling response slots effectively, maintaining cohesion within the discourse, and taking steps to repair mishearings or misunderstandings. This kind of assessment, based on the principles of conversational analysis, provided an objective appraisal of the conversational skills of the children, and also highlighted potential areas for therapeutic intervention. Many of the conversational behaviours exhibited by the two subjects corresponded with those that have been observed in very young children who are developing language normally. It is suggested that the subjects studied here presented with a severe delay in their conversational development rather than a disorder.

Speech and language skills in children who required neonatal intensive care. I. Spontaneous speech at 6.5 years of age

“…A deficit in pragmatics, referred to as a conversational disability (32), may be the result either of a linguistic impairment which prevents the child from participating efficiently in a conversation, or of a cognitive or socio-cognitive deficit which prevents the child from making sense of what is happening around him (33,27). Children with deviations in pragmatic aspects need special attention in view of the possible influence of pragmatic deficits on social relations (33). Groups IB and III in the present study were the only two groups of children which differed significantly in the pragmatic aspects from the control group.…”

The base layer and the gaze/gesture layer of transcription

“…Previously, the major focus was on assessment of linguistic systems via norm-referenced and standardized tests; now, however, clinical linguists and their colleagues in various disciplines of applied linguistics (e.g., speech-language pathologists, ESL teachers, educators) have become more focused on authentic speech and language data. Many of these professionals understand the limitations of normreferenced and standardized tests as descriptors of language pro ciency and they have moved progressively toward the collection and analysis of connected speech and language via sampling procedures (e.g., Halliday and Hasan, 1976;BarrieBlackley, Musselwhite and Rogister, 1978;Muma, 1978;Damico, 1985;Crystal, 1992;McTear and Condi-Ramsden, 1992;Perkins, Body and Parker, 1995;Willcox and Mogford-Bevan, 1995;Ferguson, 1996). As a result of this focus on authentic data, sampling procedures and the strategies for authentic data collection and analysis have become more important; clinical linguists are embracing rather than ignoring the complexity and synergy of linguistic and communicative data for assessment purposes and are more aware of the complexity of the procedures employed to investigate these data (Damico, 1993;Mü ller, 2000).…”

The management of conversational topic by a ten year old child with pragmatic difficulties

“…These shifts can have the eOE ect of turning a conversation to the child's favoured topics (Bishop et al, in press). Resources for developing an ongoing topic may be limited to the partial or wholesale repetition of a conversational partner's previous utterance ( Willcox and Mogford-Bevan , 1995b).…”

“…Therefore quantitative analyses which ® nd these children to bè ignoring' or`failing to respond to' initiations made by their conversational partners can be challenged for taking initiations as a blanket category. Willcox and Mogford-Bevan (1995b), for example, present the following sequence as an example of a child ignoring an adult's initiation and initiating a new topic himself. The child is playing with a Play People camper, with his nursery nurse.…”