Adaptation to aphasia: grammar, prosody and interaction

Abstract

This paper investigates recurrent use of the phrase very good by a speaker with non-fluent agrammatic aphasia. Informal observation of the speaker's interaction reveals that she appears to be an effective conversational partner despite very severe word retrieval difficulties that result in extensive reliance on variants of the phrase very good. The question that this paper addresses using an essentially conversation analytic framework is: What is the speaker achieving through these variants of very good and what are the linguistic and interactional resources that she draws on to achieve these communicative effects? Tokens of very good in the corpus were first analyzed in a bottom-up fashion, attending to sequential position, structure and participant orientation. This revealed distinct uses that were subsequently subjected to detailed acoustic analysis in order to investigate specific prosodic characteristics within and across the interactional variants. We identified specific clusters of prosodic cues that were exploited by the speaker to differentiate interactional uses of very good. The analysis thus shows how, in the adaptation to aphasia, the speaker exploits the rich interface between prosody, grammar and interaction both to manage the interactional demands of conversation and to communicate propositional content.