Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL

Stammering Research. Vol. 1.
exchanges, we always find a plethora of strategies, devices, or mechanisms that help us “get things done”
in conversation – even in the face of a communicative disorder’.
5. Conclusion
While this paper has indicated how some of the existing work in the field of conversation analysis may
have relevance for research into stammering, we can identify a number of specific areas which might
warrant such investigation. The existing stammering literature suggests that there are various opportunities
for well-designed research studies to extend the work on turn-taking and repair carried out by conversation
analysts. Such studies have the potential to demonstrate how interlocutors actively and skillfully work to
achieve orderliness in an environment that is characterised by potential disorder. Although the pauses,
restarts, prolongations, repetitions and numerous other features that constitute stammering represent a
constant threat to communication, there is a need to examine the extent to which this threat is realized in
conversational interaction, and identify and describe the management strategies that are employed in an
attempt to prevent it.
As much of the research into stammering has focused on the speech mechanism and the specific act of
stammering, the interactional implications of various types of dysfluency and the role of the listener in the
process has been frequently overlooked. Indeed this neglect was one of the motivating factors behind
Martin Duckworth's (1988:73) appeal for 'further analysis of stuttering.... outside the well-tried and tested
frameworks of reading and within more naturalistic conversational settings'. From a conversation analytic
perspective one of the most interesting aspects of recipient behaviour are cases where 'listeners' finish off
the ‘spaeker’s utterance. While such instances are generally categorized under the rubric of pre-emptive
completions (see Lerner, 1989), it is possible that they take on a rather different character in conversations
involving people who stammer. A refusal to allow people who stammer to finish off their sentences seems
to represent a lack of understanding regarding the problems that they encounter in interaction and research
in this area may help to explain why recipients display apparent patience and understanding at one point in
the interaction, yet feel the need to intervene at others.
Of course not all recipient activities are unwelcome and as we have already seen, there are various ways
in which speakers can construct or design their utterances in order to display an orientation and sensitivity
to people who stammer. Our discussion of response tokens and the illustration of Tetnowski and Damico’s
(2001) work underlined the facilitative role that people who stammer’s co-conversationalists can play,
especially during periods of dysfluency (or apparent dysfluency). By producing ‘continuers’ at regular
intervals they help to reassure people who stammer, not just that they are being understood but, perhaps
more importantly, that they are not about to be challenged for the floor. In this respect they perform a vital
function and help to counteract some of the pressures that stammering and the turn taking system conspire
to create. While different conversational partners are likely to respond to people who stammer in very
different ways it would be useful to know whether or not this variation was patterned. For example, there
may be systematic differences, in terms of their interactional response to dysfluency, between speech
therapists and others who have an insight into the nature of stammering on the one hand, and those who
have very little understanding of the difficulties encountered by people who stammer on the other. This
could also be extended to incorporate different speech exchange systems, for example the therapeutic
interview compared to everyday conversation. Some research of an experimental nature has already been
carried out into the relationship between interview style (formal as opposed to casual) and level of
dysfluency (Howell, Kapoor, & Rustin, 1997)., and future conversation analytic work has the potential to
build on this.
I have alluded to many of these possible avenues of exploration throughout the article, but some bear
repeating here. As multi-party talk introduces additional constraints into the interaction an examination of
how PWS cope with these would be useful. A study involving teleconferencing would facilitate the
analysis of PWS interacting with other PWS and people who don’t stammer simultaneously without the
additional complexities associated with face-to-face interaction. While face-to-face interaction is a valid
arena for future research on stammering this needs to be developed on a step-by-step basis. Some of issues
that emerged from Tetnowski and Damico’s video analysis need to be examined in much more depth and
these will inevitably open up additional areas of interest. Through the cumulative development of research
in these two distinct interactional environments we may be able to gain a deeper understanding of the
different constraints that operate in each and why some people who stammer are able to manage these more
successfully than others.
The main thrust of this paper, then, has been to propose that conversation analysis provides an
appropriate framework on which to build an analysis of stammering and to conclude it is appropriate to
reiterate some of the key arguments underpinning this proposition. First, such an approach facilitates a
consideration of the interactional implications of the disorder and an evaluation of the contribution of
both speaker and listener to the overall communication process. It is insufficient to focus solely on the
individual and his or her speech disorder when attempting to understand the experience of stammering.
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