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The analysis of language use in real-world contexts poses particular methodological challenges. We codify responses to these challenges as a series of methodological imperatives. To demonstrate the relevance of these imperatives to clinical investigation, we present analyses of single episodes of interaction where one participant has a speech and/or language impairment: atypical prosody, echolalia and dysarthria. We demonstrate there is considerable heuristic and analytic value in taking this approach to analysing the organization of interaction involving individuals with a speech and/or language impairment.

The empirical focus of this paper is a conversational turn-taking phenomenon in which conjunctions produced immediately after a point of possible syntactic and pragmatic completion are treated by co-participants as points of possible completion and transition relevance. The data for this study are audio-video recordings of 5 unscripted face-to-face interactions involving native speakers of US English, yielding 28 'trail-off' conjunctions. Detailed sequential analysis of talk is combined with analysis of visible features (including gaze, posture, gesture and involvement with material objects) and technical phonetic analysis. A range of phonetic and visible features are shown to regularly co-occur in the production of 'trail-off' conjunctions. These features distinguish them from other conjunctions followed by the cessation of talk.

We describe and exemplify a methodology for providing an integrated account of the communicative function of parametric phonetic detail and its relationship with interactional organization. We exemplify our analytic approach by documenting two different phonetic designs of stand-alone 'so' in a corpus of recorded American English telephone conversations. These two designs - which encompass particular loudness, pitch and laryngeal characteristics - correlate with different communicative functions and have different consequences for the interactional- sequential organization of the talk. We argue that if phonology is to be truly concerned with function and linguistic contrast, we need to induce those functions and domains of contrast from a thorough going phonetic and sequential analysis of talk-in-interaction.

An auspicious but unexplored environment for studying phonetic variation in naturalistic interaction is where two or more participants say the same thing at the same time. Working with a core dataset built from the multimodal Augmented Multi-party Interaction corpus, the principles of conversation analysis were followed to analyze the sequential organization of the talk and to explain the phonetic variation observed. Acoustic divergence and equivalence between simultaneous responses are described. Phonetic features discussed include duration and timing, pitch, loudness, and phonation type. The interactional factors that explain the acoustic divergences are established through turn-by-turn analysis and consideration of gaze direction and other visible features. It is argued that any research on phonetic variation in naturalistic talk that disregards the local organization of interaction will always be incomplete.

The diagnosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) characterises patients at risk of dementia and may provide an opportunity for disease-modifying interventions. Identifying persons with MCI (PwMCI) from adults of a similar age without cognitive complaints is a significant challenge. The main aims of this study were to determine whether generic speech differences were evident between PwMCI and healthy controls (HC), whether such differences were identifiable in responses to recent or remote memory questions, and to determine which speech variables showed the clearest between-group differences. This study analysed recordings of 8 PwMCI (5 females, 3 males) and 14 HC of a similar age (8 females, 6 males). Participants were recorded interacting with an intelligent virtual agent: a computer-generated talking head on a computer screen which asks pre-recorded questions when prompted by the interviewee through pressing the next key on a computer keyboard. Responses to recent and remote memory questions were analysed. Mann–Whitney U tests were used to test for statistically significant differences between PwMCI and HC on each of 12 speech variables, relating to temporal characteristics, number of words produced and pitch. It was found that compared to HC, PwMCI produce speech for less time and in shorter chunks, they pause more often and for longer, take longer to begin speaking and produce fewer words in their answers. It was also found that the PwMCI and HC were more alike when responding to remote memory questions than when responding to recent memory questions. These findings show great promise and suggest that detailed speech analysis can make an important contribution to diagnostic and stratification systems in patients with memory complaints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A body of research has shown that there are linguistic differences in the way people with epilepsy talk about their seizures when compared to those with non‐epileptic seizures. We extend this line of research by presenting the results of a phonetic analysis comparing speech samples from people with a confirmed diagnosis of epilepsy (7 patients), to those with a confirmed diagnosis of non‐epileptic seizures (8 patients). Variables considered include features of pitch, intensity, duration and pausing in their responses to questions from a neurologist during medical history‐taking. We find only limited evidence of differences between the two diagnostic groups (epilepsy vs. non‐epileptic seizures). We discuss possible reasons for this lack of evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speakers in conversation are in the first instance allocated the space in which to produce a single unit of talk which could figure as a complete turn. One way speakers can continue talk beyond a point of possible turn-completion is by producing a continuation in maximally close proximity to the point of possible turn-completion. This article extends our understanding of how speakers do this, and to what interactional effect. Several phonetic features characterising close-proximity continuations are described. These include continuation of voicing, articulatory anticipation and other phonetic features. It is argued that close-proximity continuation helps ensure speakers get to continue their turn past a point of possible turn-completion. This argument is supported by close inspection of the talk leading up to the point of possible turn-completion, the start of the continuation, and the responses of co-participants – especially with regard to whether the point of possible turn-completion engenders incoming talk or not. The method combines analysis of phonetic and sequential details of 240 points of possible turn-completion in audio recordings of unscripted American English telephone calls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates prototypically “turn-final” pitch features (fall-to-low) at points of possible turn-completion where the same speaker continues. It is shown that points of possible turn-completion accompanied by fall-to-low and followed by same-speaker continuation only rarely engender incoming talk. It is shown that such points are frequently accompanied by nonpitch talk-projecting phonetic features and that the presence of these features may constrain the nature of any incoming talk. The results of the study should serve as caution to researchers with regard to an overemphasis on intonation when describing and analyzing talk-in-interaction. Data are from audio recordings of American English telephone calls. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Linguists, and other analysts of discourse, regularly make appeal to affectual states in determining the meaning of utterances. We examine two kinds of sequence that occur in everyday conversation. The first involves one participant making an explicit lexical formulation of a co-participant's affectual state (e.g., ‘you sound happy’, ‘don't sound so depressed’). The second involves responses to ‘positive informings’ and ‘negative informings’. Through consideration of sequential organization, participant orientation, and phonetic detail, we suggest that the attribution of analytic categories of affect is problematic. We argue that phonetic characteristics which might be thought to be associated with affect may better be accounted for with reference to the management of particular sequential-interactional tasks. The finding that stance does not inhere in any single turn at talk or any single linguistic aspect leads us to suggest that future investigations into stance and affect will need to pay attention simultaneously to matters of both linguistic-phonetic and sequential organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In everyday English conversation, talk can be produced such that it is simultaneously a grammatical ending of what precedes it, and a beginning of what follows (e.g. “that''s what I’d like to have is a fresh one”). A range of features of phonetic design (including pitch, loudness, duration, and articulatory characteristics) are shown to be deployed in systematic ways in order to handle the dual tasks of avoiding the signaling of transition relevance at the end of the pivot, and marking out the fittedness of the pivot to both what precedes and what follows. Turns built with pivots are found to be most often engaged in assessing, enquiring, or reporting, though their more general application as a practice for the continuation of a turn past a point of possible syntactic and pragmatic completion is emphasized. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper represents part of the output of an ongoing study of clusters of phonetic parameters in the management of talk-in-interaction. Here we report on the sequential organisation and phonetic form of abrupt-joins. By abrupt-join we mean to adumbrate a complex of recurrent phonetic events which attend a point of possible turn-completion, and the beginning of an immediately subsequent turn-constructional unit (TCU) produced by that same speaker. In doing an abrupt-join, the speaker can be seen to preempt the transition relevance and interactional implicativeness of the first unit. The phonetic features which constitute this practice include duration, rhythm, pitch, loudness and articulatory characteristics of both the end of the first unit and the beginning of the second. Abrupt-joins are a resource used in the building of a particular kind of multi-unit turn, where each unit performs a discrete action with the abrupt-join marking the juncture between them, with the subsequent talk changing the sequential trajectory projectable from the talk leading up to the abrupt-join. One clear distributional pattern emerges from the data: abrupt-joins occur regularly in closing-relevant and topic-transition sequences. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Repetition poses certain problems for pragmatics, as evidenced by Sperber and Wilson''s claim that “the effects of repetition on utterance interpretation are by no means constant”. This is particularly apposite when we examine repetitions produced in naturally occurring talk. As part of an ongoing study of how phonetics relates to the dynamic evolution of meaning within the sequential organisation of talk-in-interaction, we present a detailed phonetic and pragmatic analysis of a particular kind of self-repetition. The practice of repetition we are concerned with exhibits a range of forms: “have another go tomorrow … have another go tomorrow”, “it might do … it might do”, “it''s a shame … it''s a shame”. The approach we adopt emphasises the necessity of exploring participants’ displayed understandings of pragmatic inferences and attempts not to prejudge the relevance of phonetic (prosodic) parameters. The analysis reveals that speakers draw on a range of phonetic features, including tempo and loudness as well as pitch, in designing these repetitions. The pragmatic function of repetitions designed in this way is to close sequences of talk. Our findings raise a number of theoretical and methodological issues surrounding the prosody–pragmatics interface and participants’ understanding of naturally occurring discourse. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]