Grant success for research into communication disorders

Scott Barnes is a principal investigator on a grant led by Minna Laakso and funded by the Academy of Finland. The project builds on prior collaboration with Suzanne Beeke and Steven Bloch focused on right hemisphere stroke and conversation (see here). There will be a special issue of Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics later this year, edited by Scott and Steven, focusing on conversation repair and communication disorders.

Title: Intersubjective Understanding in Atypical Human Interaction. A comparative study of repair organization in conversational interactions involving participants with cognitive, linguistic, motor, or sensory-perceptual communication disorders

Description: The project studies how intersubjective understanding is managed in atypical interactions involving participants with communication disorders. The disorders studied are on cognitive (autism spectrum disorders, dementia), linguistic (adult aphasia and developmental language disorder), motor speech (dysarthria), and sensory-perceptual (hearing loss) levels of human communicative performance. We examine self-repairs on speaker’s own speech, and other-initiations of repair by the recipient of talk. The atypical interactions studied will be compared to typical interactions, and cross-linguistically between Finnish and English data sets. The results provide new theoretical insight to the fundamentals of human conversational interaction in connection with deficits in cognitive, interactional, linguistic, motor, and sensory-perceptual levels of human performance. The results can be used for guidance and developing conversation-based interventions.

Research team: Laakso, Minna (Primary Chief Investigator), Sorjonen, Marja-Leena (Principal Investigator), Haakana, Markku (Principal Investigator), Fox, Barbara (Principal Investigator), Barnes, Scott (Principal Investigator), Beeke, Suzanne (Principal Investigator), Bloch, Steven (Principal Investigator), Ekberg, Katie (Principal Investigator)