This project examines repair organization in asymmetric interaction. Interactional repairs enable change and facilitate learning of language and other cognitive skills. We study conversational problems stemming from deficits in cognitive, linguistic, motor, and sensory-perceptual levels of human performance, unpack the interactional repair activities handling the problems, and the distribution of labor in repair work between the participants.
The data are videotaped conversational interactions involving participants with cognitive (dementia, autism), linguistic (adult aphasia and developmental language disorder), motor (dysarthria), and sensory-perceptual (hearing impairment) deficits. Different atypical data sets are compared with each other and with conversational interactions of adults and children without impairments.
The results provide new theoretical insight to the fundamentals of human conversational interaction in occasions of communication breakdowns and on the effects of perceptual, motor, linguistic and cognitive deficits on the management of intersubjective understanding between the interlocutors. The results will be used to develop ecologically valid assessment and intervention methods that have potential to generalize into the everyday life of the people with communication impairments.
Funding: Academy of Finland, decision no. 333858, 28.5.2020, decision no. 365567, 28.11.2024 COMPAIR. Comparing repair analytic tool for the assessment of communicative functioning.
Kati Pajo, Seija Pekkala, Satu Saalasti, Inkeri Salmenlinna, Minea Tikkanen, Leena Tuomiranta
Scott Barnes (Macquarie University), Suzanne Beeke (University College London), Steven Bloch (University College London), Andrea Bruun (University College London), Katie Ekberg (University of Queensland), Barbara A. Fox (University of Colorado), Carolyn Rickard (University of Colorado), and Marja-Leena Sorjonen.