Browsing by Subject "korjauskäytänteet"

Aim. Compared to spoken conversations, achieving mutual understanding may be more at risk when one or more participants use aided communication. An aided communicator may take a passive role in conversations and may not have adequate strategies to repair conversational breakdowns when they occur. The aim of this study was to describe how an aided communicator may attempt to solve the problems he encounters in conversations with his speaking communication partners. Aided communicator’s repair strategies, causes of breakdowns and partners’ influence on repair phenomena were studied. This study may help professionals to acknowledge the threats that compromise achieving mutual understanding in aided conversations and recognize some of the strategies in overcoming potential communication disrupts. Method. Within the framework of data driven qualitative analysis this case study examined videotaped conversations, where an 11-year-old boy using communication book communicated with his mom, teacher and peer. The data was originally videotaped as a part of the international research project Becoming an Aided Communicator. Data driven analysis was considered as an appropriate method for studying a topic with limited previous research. Results and conclusion. Almost all of the aided communicator’s repairs were self-initiated self-repairs and the rest were other-initiated self-repairs. The former occurred mostly as responses to the partner’s misinterpretations and operational difficulties while the latter followed requests for clarifications. Aided communicator repaired by repeating or modifying his utterances or by adding new elements to the original utterance. For repairs he utilized nonverbal modalities: gaze, gestures and actions. In some exchanges, he changed modality. Reasons for the misinterpretations and requests for clarifications emerged from the linguistic limitations of the graphic communication system and partner’s difficulty in understanding the aided communicator’s nonverbal communicative acts. Operational challenges seemed to be related to partner’s experience with using communication aids that affected the fluency of communication. Partners’ varying familiarity with aided communication seemed to affect the need to repair and the effectivity of repair. In addition, the shared competence of the dyad influenced achieving mutual understanding. For the best results of support and guidance, speech and language therapists should emphasize finding out the communicator’s individual strategies in repair as well as effective practices to use a communication book. This could be implemented by video-based observations.

Other-initations of repair are turns where speaker express to the interlocutor that there was some problem with receiving the previous turn. Problems can for example be related to hearing or understanding the previous turn. Other-initations of repair are used for maintaining the intersubjectivity of the conversation i.e. mutual understanding between the participants. By studying the other-initations of repairs by multilingual children information can be obtained for example about language development and conversations skills of multilingual children. The purpose of this thesis was to study the other-initations of repair used by 5-year old multilingual children. The study aimed to find out what type of other-inititations of repair multilingual children use, what kind of problems children were dealing with by other-initiation of repair and in what situations the other-initations or repair are used. The study was also comparing the other- initations of repair by children in play and evaluation situations. 6 multilingual 5-year old children were selected for the sample from the participants of the PAULA project of Univercities of Helsinki and Turku. The language background of all subjects was Russian. Material consisted of videos about play and evaluation situations between children and logopedics students. The other-initations of repair by children were annotated from the videos with ELAN program and classified by using a ready-made template. A total of 27 other-initations of repair were found and analysed qualitatively using conversation analysis. The study found that the most common type of other-initations of repair by 5-year old multilingual children was open repair initations with a total of 14 of all the found other-initations of repairs. The second most common type of other-initation of repair was candidate understandings with a total of 13. The study revealed that children used bodily repair initations in particular. Repetition of the previous turn also emerged as a common type of other-initation of repair. Multilingual children used the other-initations of repairs more in the evaluation situations than in play situations. The other-initations of repair used by children were found to be particularly focused on situations where the child was expected to respond or act in response to the adult's turn. The children often brought up the whole previous turn with their other-initations of repair.