Browsing by Author "Partanen, Elina"

Aims: Embodied practices among people with aphasia remain relatively little known until now. The aim of this study was to describe free conversation interaction between a seriously aphasic speaker and his wife. This study aims to explore what kinds of nonverbal elements appear during the conversation of the aphasic person, and how the nonverbal elements arise in different conversational turns. The main focus of this study is on the substitutive and the complementary gestures of the speech. Earlier studies on aphasia interaction suggest that gestures are an important resource to construct meanings in turns of an aphasic speaker. Data and methods: This is a qualitative study where conversational analysis is used as a research method. Data consists of two videotaped recordings of the couples' free conversation at home settings. Results and conclusions: Several nonverbal elements, which had a significant influence for the conversation interaction of this couple, appeared in the data of this study. The wife interpreted aphasic person's nonverbal elements in the conversation as meaningful elements. The wife gave time and space for the aphasic person to participate in conversation. The aphasic speaker took advantage of the gestures in order to compensate speech loss. In fact, he almost completely relied on the substitutive and complementary gestures in conversation. He used the gestures in many ways and combined gestures skillfully to his limited verbal elements. A significant result in the study was that the aphasic speaker hardly showed any signs for verbal word search before expressing nonverbal elements. He started gesturing often seamlessly just before of his typical turn initiator verbal expressions yeah yes and yeah but or simultaneously with them. Aphasic person's expression were built fast and effortlessly despite the loss of speech. It can be said that aphasic person had adapted to his handicap caused by aphasia by taking advantage from gesturing.