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