ID repair for Bloch&Barnes FINAL oct 2019.pdf (3.14 MB)
Download fileTo initiate repair or not? Coping with difficulties in the talk of adults with intellectual disabilities
journal contribution
posted on 2019-10-24, 10:16 authored by Charles Antaki, Deborah Chinn, Chris Walton, WML Finlay, Joe SempikHow do health and social care professionals deal with undecipherable talk produced by adults
with intellectual disabilities (ID)? Some of their practices are familiar from the other-initiated
repair canon. But some practices seem designed for, or at least responsive to, the needs of the
institutional task at hand, rather than those of difficult-to-understand conversational partners.
One such practice is to reduce the likelihood of the person with ID issuing any but the least
repair-likely utterances, or indeed having to speak at all. If they do produce a repairable turn,
then, as foreshadowed by Barnes and Ferguson’s (2015) work on conversations with people
with aphasia, their interlocutors may overlook its deficiencies, respond only minimally,
simply pass up taking a turn, or deal with it discreetly with an embedded repair. When the
interlocutor does call for a repair, they will tend to offer candidate understandings built from
comparatively flimsy evidence in the ID speaker's utterance. Open-class repair initiators are
reserved for utterances with the least evidence to go on, and the greatest projection of a
response from the interlocutor. We reflect on what this tells us about the dilemma facing
those who support people with intellectual disabilities.
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- Communication and Media
Published in
Clinical Linguistics and PhoneticsVolume
34Issue
10-11Pages
954 - 976Publisher
Taylor & FrancisVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics on 11 November 2019, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/02699206.2019.1680734.Acceptance date
2019-10-11Publication date
2019-11-11Copyright date
2019ISSN
0269-9206eISSN
1464-5076Publisher version
Language
- en