The interactional competence of aphasic speakers in speech therapy sessions

This paper deals with interactions between people affected with aphasia and speech therapists during speech therapy consultations. It analyses specific sequences that show how interactional competence is deployed by the aphasic speaker. After having been traditionally approached by experimental studies, aphasia, during the last decades, has been the focus of a growing number of Conversation Analytical researches, that has shown the importance of examining naturally occurring interactions between patient and speech therapist, as well as between patient and family members (Wilkinson et al. 1998). This has permitted to analyse the linguistic deficiencies that define aphasia not in a vacuum but in a context of interaction in which the patient realises, in a socially adequate way and in collaboration with the interlocutor(s), the activities in which (s)he is engaged. Moving from an “internal” view of competence based on the individual speaker towards a notion of competence as socially distributed and collaboratively built (Goodwin 1995, 2004), these studies have demonstrated that, despite the deeply reduced linguistic resources at her/his disposal, the aphasic speaker can indeed participate in interaction as a competent speaker and interlocutor (Ulatowska et al. 1976; Damico et al. 1995; Laakso 1997; Ferguson 1998; Goodwin 2003; Oelschlaeger & Damico 2003; Helasvuo et al. 2004; Cruz 2006; Barnes et al. 2013). Our research pursues these issues, focusing on the way in which, in speech therapy sessions, and despite her/his limited linguistics resources, the aphasic speaker deploys, through his audible and visible conduct, strategies for initiating actions and eventually counterbalancing an asymmetric distribution of competences, rights and obligations. These initiatives concern the organisation of the activity and particularly the transition between different activities within the session, or different moments within the same activity (the patient can stop, exploit or favour these transitions, introducing for instance new topics of conversation). They are also related to the management of intersubjectivity and the way the patient initiates repair on actions and turns performed by the speech therapist, correcting personal information or repairing a misunderstanding. The research is based on a corpus (approx. 25 hours) of speech therapy sessions video-recorded in a French-speaking region of Switzerland.