Browsing by Author "Kokkonen, Tuomo"

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) weakens the concerned person’s ability to repair their own speech. AD has also been shown to affect the use of gestures during speech. This study looks at the actions of persons with AD during self-repair sequences in a group context. and examines the length of the repair sequences, the number of repair initiations and repairs and their distribution among the people taking part in the discussions. The study also investigates how people with AD use manual gestures during self-repair sequences. The connection between word-searching and gestures was also examined. The research method is based on the theoretical frameworks of conversation analysis, multimodal interaction analysis and repair sequence theory. The research material consisted of self-repair sequences and the manual gestures within those sequences recorded from group therapy sessions directed at people diagnosed with dementia. The participants of the study were six females with AD. The video recordings were analyzed using ELAN- computer program. The speech and gestural interaction of the participants was annotated in temporal synchronicity. ELAN was able to provide numeric data, but some of the data was calculated manually. Due to a lack of research on this study’s topic, it was necessary to develop the method to be used in the study. The research data comprises 183 self-repair sequences. 91,8 % of those consisted of a single turn. The mean length of the sequences was 6,2 seconds. Within the self-repair sequences, there were 496 self-initiations and 26 other-initiations. Within the self-repair sequences, 216 self-repairs and 22 other-repairs were detected. Word-search was the most common type of self-repair (37 %). Three out of six subjects produced 92,9 % of the repair-sequences. Half of the self-repair-sequences contained manual gestures. 177 gestures were observed. Three of the subjects produced 96,6% of all the gestures. Two of them produced gestures during 60 % of their repair sequences while producing 87% of all gestures. The subject producing third most gestures did so in about one third of her repair sequences. The most-used gesture type was rhythmic gesture (37,2%). Of all gestures 67,8% were produced during word-searches. The method made it possible to describe, at a general level, the gesture use of persons with AD during repair-sequences containing self-repair. According to the results, there is a lot of individual diversity in the phenomenon. However, the skewness and small number of participants in the study make this assumption uncertain. The results imply that persons with AD use gestures to support their speech. It is possible that more gestures occur during word-searches. Therefore, the use of gestures must be taken into consideration during speech repair. It can also be assumed that persons with moderate stage of AD are able to perceive the problematic parts in their own speech and are able to produce repairs if they are given enough time to process.