Abstract:

In this paper we introduce two main areas of interactional research in the field of spoken language analysis, and describe with some brief preliminary studies, how these can be applied to the study of disordered speech. Interactional phonetics is a school of phonetic analysis that looks beyond the traditional concerns of phoneticians with the description of segmental speech features (especially those concerned with lexical contrast in a given speech variety) to those features (both supra- and subsegmental) that are used to signal events in talk in interaction. We demonstrate how this approach can be employed in disordered speech with two brief examples; one from an adult and one from a child. Systemic phonology deriving from work in Firthian prosodic phonology and situated within the Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics, brings the explicit concerns of the interactional context into the analysis of sound system choices. We illustrate this with disordered speech with an example from an adult with progressive speech deterioration.

Author: Martin J. Ball, Jack S Damico