Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL

Stammering Research. Vol. 1.
by Sacks and his colleagues is the pause. This is a silence that occurs within a participant's turn and is
attributable to that person.
Nofsinger (1991:95) outlines three primary ways in which pauses may arise. The first of these is
relatively straightforward and concerns the silence after a TRP when no listener self-selects and the current
speaker decides to continue. In this situation the silence at the TRP then retrospectively becomes a silence
within that speaker's turn. Silence at a TRP may also be classified as a pause if a listener does not
immediately respond after being selected by the current speaker. Consequently the silence is attributable to
a specific listener because they have rights and obligations to speak having been selected to do so. The final
sort of pause is somewhat different in that it does not occur at a TRP. This is where a silence materializes in
the course of a person's turn, for whatever reason (for example, a pause for thought or a momentary
memory lapse).
To differentiate between silences in this way may seem unduly academic but as interlocutors themselves
make this distinction (see Sacks et al. 1978:54) it can aid our analysis of stammering considerably. The fact
that all silences are not oriented to in the same way by conversationalists has potential implications for
people who stammer and raises the possibility that the impact of a particular dysfluency will be determined
by its placement in the overall structure of the turn-taking system, with those occurring close to a TRP
liable to prove more critical. Bearing in mind the nature of the disorder we would expect to find a large
number of silences in the speech of people who stammer. However, what is important from a conversation
analytic perspective is how these silences are treated by their conversational partners.
Stammering, of course, manifests itself in a number of different ways and each individual will display
their own idiosycratic pattern of behaviours. The speech of some people who stammer will contain a
plethora of silences, while others will go to extreme lengths to ensure that talk is continuous, no matter how
meaningless that talk may appear. The fact that people who stammer are able to maintain their turn in spite
of frequent and, at times, lengthy blocks contradicts the common-sense view that turn taking in telephone
conversation is activated by pauses (see Cappella 1979) and, instead, seems to support Hopper's (1992:114)
finding that 'participants usually limit speaker change to pauses following transition-relevance places'.
However, these speculative observations need to be underpinned by empirical evidence and this highlights
the need for a detailed examination of the talk of people who stammer, focusing in particular on events
surrounding TRPs. While conversation analysis could be fruitfully applied to a wide range of stammeringrelated
issues, there are a number of advantages in making the telephone environment the initial site of such
research.
Speaker transfer in telephone talk
The tendency for telephone interaction to exacerbate the communication difficulties of people who
stammer is well-documented and many rate this high in their list of dysfluent situations (Dalton &
Hardcastle 1977:89; Leith & Timmons 1983). Recent research on this phenomenon has produced some
interesting findings (Brumfit & James 2001, James, Brumfitt & Cudd 1999), but as a survey was used
as the primary means of data collection the results are based upon people’s attitudes and opinions,
rather than the actual details of interaction. An earlier study by Zimmerman, Kalinowski, Stuart and
Rastatter (1997) examined the effect of altered auditory feedback 15 on stammering, but while
recordings of actual telephone interaction were employed, this research was based on an experimental
design and the conversations were scripted. Conversation analytic research, by contrast, would allow us
to examine the interactional consequences of stammering through a fine-grained analysis of the details
of recorded naturally-occurring conversation. In this way we could explore the reasons why the
telephone might be a particularly problematic environment for people who stammer or, perhaps more
accurately, why face-to-face interaction seems to be less troublesome. By focusing on the naturally
occurring talk of people who stammer and their co-conversationalists this type of study would attempt to
examine the nature of the various difficulties that arise during interaction and describe and explicate the
various methods and procedures that participants employ in an attempt to overcome them.
The analysis of telephone talk has a respected history within conversation analysis and formed the basis
of much of the early ground-breaking research. More recently, Robert Hopper (1992) has focused more
intensively on this form of interaction and his observations are directly relevant to a conversation analytic
perspective on stammering. Although the benefits of telephone analysis are documented elsewhere (e.g.
Benson & Hughes:1983:158-9; Drummond & Hopper 1991; Hopper 1992), it may help to summarise
some of the most important ones here. First, as telephone communication is 'constrained to sounds, split
off from the rest of action' (Hopper 1992:8) we are able to focus exclusively on the most basic elements of
talk-in-interaction. In this respect, the non-verbal activities which sometimes threaten to overwhelm
15 See Howell (2004) for a review of research on ‘alterations to recurrent auditory feedback’ (ARAI)
and a discussion of how the fluency-enhancing effects of ARAI in people who stammer might be
employed in a clinical setting.
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