Language is quintessentially social and is shaped by and for social interaction (Levinson, 2006). The core ecology for language use in all cultures is a speech and gesture exchange system in which participants take short, rapidly alternating turns (Levinson and Holler, 2014). The most recent trend in the study of social interaction focuses on how multimodal resources – including language and bodily movements, such as gestures – are used in building human action (Mondada, 2014, 2016). In the interaction between typical speakers, there is an assumption that actions produced by a participant are “the product of procedures or methods which are socially shared and used” and that will inform the design, production, and interpretation of action (Heritage, 1987, 266). However, in interactions involving atypical populations, for example, people with various neurodivergencies, this assumption may be significantly challenged since a condition may impact in consequential ways the shape of interaction (Matthews and Harrington, 2000; Antaki and Wilkinson, 2012; Wilkinson, 2019).
The panel is going to answer the following research questions:
- What are the forms of adapted talk produced by individuals who experience communicative barriers and their co-participants? Which adaptations in social interaction can accommodate them?
- What and how are situated multimodal resources mobilized to streamline interaction (e.g., to facilitate conversational turn-taking) and reach mutual understanding?
We work on the assumption that individuals experiencing various communicative impairments bring their own compensatory communicative resources for interacting. Multimodality becomes a resource for successfully managing interaction, even though it may require multiple adaptation practices (e.g., Auer and Bauer, 2011; Chen, 2022). Even in situations where the utterances of these individuals or their use of multimodal resources are perceived as disruptive or incoherent because of their non-normativity, diverse meanings motivate them, which are interactively achieved (e.g., Crompton et al., 2020; Williams et al., 2021; Korkiakangas and Rae, 2014; Wiklund, 2012). Multiple studies have demonstrated how meanings can emerge from fractured enunciation and vulnerable or atypical subjects, drawing on diverse semiotic resources (e.g., sign languages (Kusters et al., 2017) or augmentative and alternative communication (e.g., Bloch and Wilkinson, 2013). It is precisely in relation to communication that seems to deviate from norms that ‘meaning,’ which is not obvious, becomes novel. The objective of this panel is to discover, describe, and explain such (a)typical, non-normative, or differently normative interaction.
The panel brings together scholars whose research deals with communicative vulnerability, accommodation strategies, and the pragmatics of asymmetric, inclusive, accessible, and bias-free communication in social interaction.
TOPICS: Clinical pragmatics, Conversation analysis/EMCA, Interactional pragmatics, Multimodal pragmatics, Sign language and deaf studies