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 />
exchanges, we always find a plethora of strategies, devices, or mechanisms that help us “get things done”<br />
in conversation – even in the face of a communicative disorder’.<br />
5. Conclusion<br />
While this paper has indicated how some of the existing work in the field of conversation analysis may<br />
have relevance for research into stammering, we can identify a number of specific areas which might<br />
warrant such investigation. The existing stammering literature suggests that there are various opportunities<br />
for well-designed research studies to extend the work on turn-taking and repair carried out by conversation<br />
analysts. Such studies have the potential to demonstrate how interlocutors actively and skillfully work to<br />
achieve orderliness in an environment that is characterised by potential disorder. Although the pauses,<br />
restarts, prolongations, repetitions and numerous other features that constitute stammering represent a<br />
constant threat to communication, there is a need to examine the extent to which this threat is realized in<br />
conversational interaction, and identify and describe the management strategies that are employed in an<br />
attempt to prevent it.<br />
As much of the research into stammering has focused on the speech mechanism and the specific act of<br />
stammering, the interactional implications of various types of dysfluency and the role of the listener in the<br />
process has been frequently overlooked. Indeed this neglect was one of the motivating factors behind<br />
Martin Duckworth's (1988:73) appeal for 'further analysis of stuttering.... outside the well-tried and tested<br />
frameworks of reading and within more naturalistic conversational settings'. From a conversation analytic<br />
perspective one of the most interesting aspects of recipient behaviour are cases where 'listeners' finish off<br />
the ‘spaeker’s utterance. While such instances are generally categorized under the rubric of pre-emptive<br />
completions (see Lerner, 1989), it is possible that they take on a rather different character in conversations<br />
involving people who stammer. A refusal to allow people who stammer to finish off their sentences seems<br />
to represent a lack of understanding regarding the problems that they encounter in interaction and research<br />
in this area may help to explain why recipients display apparent patience and understanding at one point in<br />
the interaction, yet feel the need to intervene at others.<br />
Of course not all recipient activities are unwelcome and as we have already seen, there are various ways<br />
in which speakers can construct or design their utterances in order to display an orientation and sensitivity<br />
to people who stammer. Our discussion of response tokens and the illustration of Tetnowski and Damico’s<br />
(2001) work underlined the facilitative role that people who stammer’s co-conversationalists can play,<br />
especially during periods of dysfluency (or apparent dysfluency). By producing ‘continuers’ at regular<br />
intervals they help to reassure people who stammer, not just that they are being understood but, perhaps<br />
more importantly, that they are not about to be challenged for the floor. In this respect they perform a vital<br />
function and help to counteract some of the pressures that stammering and the turn taking system conspire<br />
to create. While different conversational partners are likely to respond to people who stammer in very<br />
different ways it would be useful to know whether or not this variation was patterned. For example, there<br />
may be systematic differences, in terms of their interactional response to dysfluency, between speech<br />
therapists and others who have an insight into the nature of stammering on the one hand, and those who<br />
have very little understanding of the difficulties encountered by people who stammer on the other. This<br />
could also be extended to incorporate different speech exchange systems, for example the therapeutic<br />
interview compared to everyday conversation. Some research of an experimental nature has already been<br />
carried out into the relationship between interview style (formal as opposed to casual) and level of<br />
dysfluency (Howell, Kapoor, & Rustin, 1997)., and future conversation analytic work has the potential to<br />
build on this.<br />
I have alluded to many of these possible avenues of exploration throughout the article, but some bear<br />
repeating here. As multi-party talk introduces additional constraints into the interaction an examination of<br />
how PWS cope with these would be useful. A study involving teleconferencing would facilitate the<br />
analysis of PWS interacting with other PWS and people who don’t stammer simultaneously without the<br />
additional complexities associated with face-to-face interaction. While face-to-face interaction is a valid<br />
arena for future research on stammering this needs to be developed on a step-by-step basis. Some of issues<br />
that emerged from Tetnowski and Damico’s video analysis need to be examined in much more depth and<br />
these will inevitably open up additional areas of interest. Through the cumulative development of research<br />
in these two distinct interactional environments we may be able to gain a deeper understanding of the<br />
different constraints that operate in each and why some people who stammer are able to manage these more<br />
successfully than others.<br />
The main thrust of this paper, then, has been to propose that conversation analysis provides an<br />
appropriate framework on which to build an analysis of stammering and to conclude it is appropriate to<br />
reiterate some of the key arguments underpinning this proposition. First, such an approach facilitates a<br />
consideration of the interactional implications of the disorder and an evaluation of the contribution of<br />
both speaker and listener to the overall communication process. It is insufficient to focus solely on the<br />
individual and his or her speech disorder when attempting to understand the experience of stammering.<br />
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