Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL

Stammering Research. Vol. 1.
and in order to explain this Perkins (1995:380) identified three key factors which had an influence on the
way that conversational partners dealt with the consequences of aphasia in conversation: the amount of
shared knowledge of the interlocutors; linguistic impairments; and individual discourse styles.
This study illustrates the benefits of a 'twin-track approach' with the quantitative analysis helping to
identify certain patterns in the data and the qualitative analysis revealing the organisational mechanisms
underlying these (Perkins 1995: 382). Perhaps more importantly, it also gives an indication of the potential
of conversation analytic research as a resource for improved therapeutic practice. Not only did the research
identify the consequences of linguistic impairments on conversational ability, it also demonstrated the
different ways that interlocutors deal with these consequences. As Perkins (1995: 382) concludes, 'the
insight that CA provides into the relationship between linguistic impairment and conversational ability
provides guidance to the selection of management strategies which take into account the linguistic
limitations of the aphasic client'.
In certain respects the burgeoning of conversation analytic work on aphasia provides an indication of the
possible avenues that similar studies of stammering could traverse. For example among the contributions
to the special issue of Aphasiology (1999, Vol 13), there were papers on the use of conversation analysis as
an assessment tool for aphasia (Perkins, Crisp & Walshaw, 1999), the collaborative nature of aphasic
conversation (Laasko & Klippi, 1999), and differential conversation patterns in aphasic-therapist, aphasicspouse
interaction (Lindsay & Wilkinson, 1999), all of which have potential relevance for conversation
analytic research on stammering. For example, Lindsay and Wilkinson’s (1999) study of repair in aphasictherapist
and aphasic-spouse conversations uncovered differential patterns to the extent that therapists
worked to minimize interactional difficulties, whereas spouses engaged in behaviour that brought
conversational repair to the surface. Their discussion of the possible reasons for these differences and their
clinical implications highlights both the theoretical and the therapeutic benefits that conversation analytic
research on aphasia can produce, and as the following extract from Hutchby and Woffitt (1998:256)
suggests, these payoffs are likely to result from similar studies of stammering:
[If] conversation analytic studies of everyday interaction provide a resource which
allows us to chart comprehensively the distressing effects of speech problems in
everyday life, then they may in turn furnish the basis for more sophisticated and
effective means of treatment. Equally important, however, the application of CA to
these kinds of data can provide deeper insight into the precise nature of the
difficulties faced by people with aphasia and other forms of speech problems.
The various studies referred to above provide fascinating insights into the communicative competencies
of different groups and individuals and we can see, even from this brief synopsis, that conversation analysis
has the potential to further our understanding of the nature of ‘disordered’ talk in a variety of interesting
ways. Wilkinson’s (1999:251) comment that ‘it is in conversation that aphasia is likely to be most visible
and problematic for people with aphasia and their conversational partners in everyday life’ can also be
applied to people who stammer and their conversational partners. However, while this research can
provide some valuable suggestions on how best to proceed with a conversation analytic investigation of
stammering, people who stammer encounter a quite distinct set of interactional difficulties and in many
ways the most relevant literature is that which relates to the 'basic' research into the mechanisms of
conversational organisation. This literature represents an important resource for stammering research and
while it is not possible to summarise it here, I will attempt to identify a few of the key issues and examine
these in some details. In the following section, therefore, I will consider some of the conversation analytic
literature on turn-taking, adjacency pairs and response tokens and attempt to highlight the potential
significance of this literature for future research on stammering.
4. Conversation analysis and stammering
4.1 The turn-taking system
One of the most interesting findings of conversation analysis, bearing in mind Chomsky's typification of
ordinary talk as disorderly and degenerate (see Goodwin & Heritage 1990: 290), is the incredibly orderly
and structured nature of conversation. The overarching objective of the present paper is to put forward the
proposition that there may be some merit in exploring how, and to what extent, that orderliness is
maintained in a conversational environment that includes stammering. Given the considerable status of
Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson's (1978) treatise on the organisation of turn taking in ordinary conversation
this will serve as my initial point of departure. In this seminal paper, Sacks and his colleagues set out to
provide a general model of the sequencing of conversations by examining the organization and allocation
of turn-taking. The turn management system that they identified is extremely effective given that 'less (and
often considerably less) than five per cent of the speech stream is delivered in overlap' and gaps between
speakers are 'frequently measured in just a few micro-seconds' (see Levinson 1983:297). The literature on
stammering seems to portray a rather different image of conversation however, one frequently disrupted by
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