Browsing by Subject "lapsi–aikuinen-vuorovaikutus"

Background and aims. The environment has a significant influence on a child's language acquisition. The interaction styles of the adults in a child's everyday environment influence also on a child's possibilities to have an active role in interaction. If a child's language develops atypically, the role of adults' interaction styles is even more significant. Adults often seem to dominate the interaction in dyads of adults and young children. This kind of asymmetry seems to be more persistent when children have atypical language development. AAC is one way to provide children with language disorders a way to communicate more equally and thus learn a more active role in interaction. The purpose of this study is to examine the interaction between a child with delayed language development and his close adults. Also the study observes the experiences of the AAC use in everyday life by a brief interview. Methods. A 2 years 7 months old child, Leo, participated this study. Leo's language development was delayed. Leo had received speech therapy intervention concentrating on the AAC use. The data of the study consists of face-to-face interaction situations between Leo and his mother, and Leo and his kindergarten teacher. Interaction situations were videotaped. Additionally the mother and the kindergarten teacher were interviewed. The interaction situations were analysed by counting the number of turns of each participant. Within turns the communication moves, communicative functions and the communication modes were analysed. Results and discussion. The results revealed that Leo was an active interaction partner using various communicative functions and modes of communication. The interaction between both dyads was quite symmetric. Leo made even a bit more initiations than his mother. However, the kindergarten teacher had a bit more dominant role in the interaction, having a bit more turns and initiations than Leo. The results of this study does not entirely support the results of previous studies in which adults were dominating the interaction in dyads of adults and young children. The one-to-one interaction situations of this study supported well reciprocal communication. Also the adults encouraged Leo to take an active role in the interaction. As being a case study the results cannot be generalised. There are relative few studies examining interaction of Finnish adult-child-dyads. More research is needed to examine general features as well as individual variation of the interaction between a child and their close adults.