Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL

Stammering Research. Vol. 1.
researchers of face-to-face interaction are excluded from the analysis. A second significant advantage of
telephone interaction is the fact that it is generally limited to two speakers. This focuses our attention on
what is 'specifically dialogic in conversation: how speech action emerges across speaker turns' (Hopper
1992:9). Finally, not only do telephone recordings eliminate the potential interference of multiple
participants and non-verbal behaviour, but they also enable the researcher to obtain the complete
conversation, from start to finish. This may be particularly significant in relation to stammering as it would
facilitate an analysis of the potentially problematic opening moves of a conversation. Together these unique
features of telephone interaction greatly simplify the transcription process and facilitate the task of the
analyst.
As telephone conversations display the purest instances of turn taking principles (Hopper 1992:100) our
recordings should enable us to address the main issue that arises from the preceding discussion, namely
how do participants know when it is their turn to speak. Given the preponderance of pauses within the turns
of people who stammer, how can listeners be sure that similar silences at TRPs do not represent temporary
dysfluency as opposed to a willingness to relinquish the floor? The short answer is that, in the absence of
nonverbal information, they do not know for sure. However, this response tends to gloss over a number of
interesting and complex issues and to put these in context I will briefly consider Robert Hopper's (1992)
research which, among other things, examined the ways in which this dilemma is solved in 'normal'
conversation. The main conclusions of his study were that speakership rarely changes following nontransition-relevant
pauses, gaps are frequent, and most gaps do communicative work. Hopper used a
randomizing procedure to select one hundred turn beginnings and while an analysis of these showed that
most turn transition occurred smoothly he was startled to find that twenty eight turns began after a pause,
many of which were of a duration longer than half a second.
However, his analysis showed that seventeen of these could be explained in terms of the model
developed by Sacks and his colleagues in that they marked actions such as disagreement or repair, while
the others were examples of 'post episode-completion pauses' (see Hopper 1992:113). Moreover, by
classifying every pause longer than two seconds in terms of its transition relevance, Hopper was able to
conduct a statistical analysis of the relationship between transition relevance and speaker change. On the
basis of this analysis of 1105 pauses, his predictions that speaker change was unlikely to occur following
non-transition relevance pauses were confirmed. He also found that speaker change would occur nine times
out of ten if a pause followed a 'current speaker selects next' procedure, but only half the time if the pause
followed a TRP where a speaker selection device was not used. This led him to conclude that there was 'a
distributional relationship between transition relevance and speaker change - at least within pause
environments' (Hopper 1992:110). A more detailed analysis of exceptional cases served only to strengthen
his conclusions and confirm the conventional model of transition relevance. So, for example, in the few
instances where speaker change did occur at non-transition-relevant pauses (for example, when pauses
immediately followed a TRP and a free-standing conjunction) these were marked as exceptional by the
next speaker (see Hopper 1992:111). There were also cases in this corpus where speaker change was
expected but did not occur, for example after a pause following the first part of an adjacency pair (see
Section 4.2 below for a more detailed discussion of the concept of adjacency pair). However, these
exceptions are also marked and Hopper's (1992:111) data suggests that 'if current speaker selects next,
pauses, then takes another turn, that next turn shows orientation to the partner's failure to speak'.
As Hopper's work can be seen as an empirical verification of the turn-taking rules it should serve as a
provisional benchmark for analysis of telephone interaction involving people who stammer. On the basis
of his research, and from my own preliminary observations, the location of silent blocks in relation to the
turn taking system are likely to have a determining influence on the interactional repercussions of these
dysfluencies. In other words, a silent speech blockage close to a TRP is likely to be treated differently by
listeners than a similar blockage in the middle of a speaker’s turn. Moreover, this type of silent stammering,
when it occurs at a TRP, will probably be more noticeable if the speaker has been other-selected rather than
self-selected.
From this perspective, the multifarious practices employed by people who stammer, many of which are
frowned upon by speech therapists, take on a new significance. The use of 'starters', 'fillers' and various
forms of circumlocution, often categorised as avoidance strategies, may serve an additional and quite
paradoxical function. By enabling the speaker to secure his or her place at a TRP these devices help to
ensure that the person who stammers does eventually get to convey his or her message. To prohibit their
use may result in greater vulnerability at TRPs, certainly in the short term, and fewer opportunities to
speak, especially in multi-party conversations. Of course, it is quite likely that these techniques are variants
of the strategies commonly used by conversationalists to signal their intention to begin or continue
speaking even before a response has been totally formulated. In these situations 'initiators' serve to secure
or 'maintain the conversational turn while momentarily not contributing substantially to the conversational
content' (Duckworth 1988:68). The main difference in relation to stammering is that many people who
stammer know what they want to say but seem unable to deliver it fluently. By producing some form of
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