Browsing by Author "Lehto, Tuuli-Lemmikki"

Background and goals. This thesis explores the number, quality and context of initiations and corrections to another's speech in an everyday aphasia conversation where one party has fluent aphasia. The initiation refers to the turn by which the interlocutor makes it clear that a previous turn is partially or completely problematic, or wants it to be refined. In this study, initiations are categorized into open requests, restricted requests, restricted offers and class other. Classification has been further extended to these subcategories. In the previous research literature, aphasia has been found to cause an emphasized role of the interlocutor in managing communication problems. The aphasia class and severity of the aphasic person have also been shown to influence the aphasic person's ability to make other-initiations and the interlocutors' preference to use candidate understandings in aphasia conversations where one party has fluent aphasia. Methods. The study's everyday aphasia conversation data have been collected as part of Managing the problems of speaking and understanding in conversations of speakers with aphasia -research project. The data for this thesis is constituted by the dyadic or three-party conversations of seven aphasic individual with their close persons. The data was annotated using ELAN according to the finished classification created in the COMPAIR project. For this study, it was important to find all other-initiations as well as other-corrections and to classify them. Results and reflection. Aphasic individuals used many of the same other-initiations as their interlocutors. However, aphasic persons did not use all the other-initiations that the interlocutors did, and they did not produce any other-corrections at all. On the other hand, the interlocutors used other-corrections relatively often. Aphasic individuals and interlocutors prefer different other-initiations. Neither the aphasia class nor the severity of aphasia was found to be related to the number of other-initiations by the aphasic person nor the preference for use of the categories, but they were found to be related to the other-initiations made by the interlocutor. Aphasic persons and interlocutors also used other-initiations with different types of problems. Fluent aphasia seems to weaken the aphasic person's ability to correct the interlocutor's speech, but on the other hand, it also increases the need for other-initiations and other-corrections made by the interlocutor to achieve mutual understanding. However, the results were unreliable due to low inter-annotator reliability.