Conversation after right hemisphere brain damage: Motivations for applying conversation analysis

Abstract

Despite the well documented pragmatic deficits that can arise subsequent to Right Hemisphere Brain Damage (RHBD), few researchers have directly studied everyday conversations involving people with RHBD. In recent years, researchers have begun applying Conversation Analysis (CA) to the everyday talk of people with aphasia. This research programme has provided novel insights into the complex inter-relationship between impairment, language use, and interactional organization. This paper will argue that the detailed, inductive approach of CA is well suited to investigating pragmatic communication disorders resulting from RHBD, and will help to elaborate previous findings about RHBD and conversation. In particular, this paper will review and discuss previous investigations of conversation after RHBD, and put forward arguments relating to how CA might be applied to talk-in-interaction involving people with RHBD.

What's left to learn about right hemisphere damage and pragmatic impairment?

“…A number of researchers have noted the heterogeneity of discourse impairment in people with RHD as well as discrepancies between their performance in experimental settings and their performance as a conversation partner (Barnes & Armstrong, 2010). However, as in the Brownell and Stringfellow (1999) study discussed above, these observations have typically been of a more or less anecdotal nature, although at least one study has directly compared the performance of people with RHD in experimental and more natural communicative situations (Vanhalle et al, 2000).…”

Adaptação da Bateria Montreal de Avaliação da Comunicação para o Português Europeu

“…Approximately 50% of patients with right hemisphere damage (RHD) have some kind of acquired communication disorder (1) , which can affect social interactions and thus pose psychosocial and functional difficulties for these people (4) . The alterations in communication include: difficulties in maintaining the topic of the conversation (7) , prosodic processing (8) and understanding metaphors (1) , for example. Therefore, it is important to evaluate communication competences in addition to language skills, not infrequently ignored when it comes to RHD patients, as they exhibit appropriate language skills (phonology, semantics, syntax, morphology), but alterations, including pragmatic communication (figurative language, metaphors, jokes) and prosody, which are very important in the social context (8) .…”

Maintenance of speech in Parkinson’s disease: The impact of group therapy

“…300,301,303,306,307 The feasibility of quantifying overlap, repair, talking time, and topic setting in the communication disordered population has been established. 288,300,302,303,310 However, in the initial exploration of conversational behaviours, the inductive nature of CA allows for new phenomena to be observed 291 and for problems in interaction to be revealed by participant reaction rather than researcher judgement. 307 As such, CA reveals conversational behaviours of interest, that can then be quantified in order to enable comparison between participants and across time.…”

“…326 The interview type structure of the earlier samples may have reflected an unequal perception of speaker rights between the participants, 326 although this was not intended by the researcher. To further explore the impact of group therapy on communication, it is recommended that future studies collect conversations between people with PD and familiar communication partners 291 and/or naive communication partners. Collecting data in dyads in quiet spaces removes some of the challenges reported by people with PD, such as background noise and distance between speakers.…”

“…182,290 During CA, the researcher avoids assumptions about what the data may reveal 289 as CA is an inductive process. 291 Transcripts of conversations are analysed, turn by turn and conversation by conversation. The analyst seeks distinctive features in an interaction, and then looks for other examples to determine if there is a pattern.…”