Most patients with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD) face difficulties in communication and expression; almost all of them lack verbal language or communication tools. However, they are capable of engaging in communication with various social partners and they employ unique strategies to do so, which remain subtle for their environment and caregivers to identify. Unfortunately, little research has been done on this topic. For this reason, our aim is to observe the conversational dynamics between individuals with diverse and fragile abilities and the adults who support them, by studying the speech acts of teachers and specialized educators addressing them during educational sessions. The data reveal that the professionals often repeat their own utterances verbatim. A preliminary qualitative analysis suggests that this phenomenon may serve to maintain the dialogue by ensuring a kind of empathetic echoing (as defined by Cosnier, 1994), which is usually expected from interlocutors as an indicator of understanding.
The analysis of atypical speech first and foremost requires considering atypical speech as an act of language. To do so, it is essential to have a pragmatic, integrated approach focused on meaning in context. Drawing on key studies conducted over the past decade on the discourse of individuals with neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) and sleep-talkers, we will justify the necessity of this paradigm shift while examining the contribution of each theoretical framework involved: interpretative semantics, enunciative linguistics, and recent advances in embodied cognition. This paradigm shift enables to reconsider the relationship between language and cognition and allows for the examination of atypical speech from an operational and functional perspective.
The description of interactions in communicative situations involving people with aphasia (PwA) is crucial for the study of dialogic mechanisms, and in particular via repairs in typical and atypical discourse. The present contribution focuses on the dialogical and multimodal study of discourse incorporation and representation in a reparative exchange situation, based on the exploration of a corpus of audiovisual data AADI (Aphasia and Analysis of Discourse in Interaction). The mechanisms of discourse incorporation and representation during a repair exchange will be illustrated by exploring firstly instances of missing words, and secondly morpho-syntactic and lexical repairs. The identification of multimodal patterns specific to aphasia will be achieved by examining the links between gestures, repairs and pauses, and by comparing interactions between PwA and typical speakers.
In some every-day life situations, children with developmental language disorders are able to understand and be understood in natural interactions. That is to say that they have a form of adaptation in interlocution. We have called this phenomenon “interactional functionality”. To study this “interactional functionality”, we have to consider differently language pathology in children, to get rid of the negative vision of the language of these children (in which we see only the defects in the framework of psychometry) and to consider them as competent subjects in interaction. “Interactional functionality” can be defined according to the paradigm of enaction, and more precisely with the concept of languaging. Enaction considers language as a collaborative, embodied and embedded activity, and admits that meaning is co-constructed in the course of interaction. These theoretical presuppositions impact the study of atypical speech. Indeed, studying “interactional functionality” implies to discard the monological and logocentric vision of language, to prefer the view of language in interaction, in its multimodal dimension, and with its contextual elements. It also implies to discard the idea of an ideal speaker and the normative vision of language. Spoken language naturally contains failures, which are part of its normal functioning and which may be of value in the interaction. Therefore, to study atypical speech, we have to use traditional conversational analysis and associate it to the study of the phenomena implied in the co-construction of meaning, such as the mechanism of interpretation. Interpretative semantics, as developed by Rastier, postulates that meaning results from interpretative pathways. This theory allows to consider that meaning can emerge from non-existing forms or words. It also explains how meaning diffuses through the different levels of discourse, by isotopy. Interpretative semantics thus seems particularly adequate to study “interactional functionality” and hereafter, atypical speech. The examples presented here illustrate how it can be applied to the transcription stage (which requires interpretation); and for the analysis of corpora. Finally, we presume that these methodological considerations about atypical speech in children could be applied to the study of other oral corpora.
Some patients with an Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) suffer from emotional dysregulation for which treatments lack evidence. The aim of the study is to explore a novel objective measure of emotional regulation through linguistic markers that could serve to test the effectiveness of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) in ABI. Along with other usual outcome measures of emotional regulation, cognitive functioning and quality of life, patients with chronic ABI were voice-recorded in 40-90 minutes semi-directive interviews, in which they narrated emotionally charged memories. Our protocol considers that emotional narration does not only involve prototypical expressions, but a multitude of emotional means (designated, suggested and/or displayed), allowing thus to measure differently the evolution of patients regarding naming and recognizing emotions. We present preliminary results for two DBT respondents and one control speaker. We demonstrate the feasibility of our protocol by linking our lexical annotation to prosody and disfluencies, and we demonstrate their mutual benefit in evaluating a patient’s evolution. This approach integrates neuropsychological and linguistic literature, framing ABI behavioral disorders as the result of overly intense or poorly managed emotions.
