Isabel Windeatt

• Conversation analysis
• Linguistics
• Atypical communication

Research Project

My research uses Conversation Analysis to investigate how silences are used and understood by people with aphasia (PWA) and their family/friends within everyday conversations. Healthcare guidance encourages allowing extra silences in talk and giving PWA extra time to respond. This implies that silences have no communicative value and result only as an artefact of aphasia. However, prior research has shown that silences have many communicative functions within interaction. I collected eleven hours of video-recorded conversations between nine dyads of PWA and their CPs and analysed them using the methodology of Conversation Analysis.

Myresearch found that PWA use silence to convey communicative content in multiple ways: as part of a dispreferred response, signalling difficulty with their turn, as space to produce a display of affect, to invite their CP to talk, and as part of providing a legitimate display of understanding. When silences result from aphasia, PWA can account for silences using turn-holding devices, or mask silences through displays of embodied thinking. PWA’s silences are also part of claiming to undertake certain mental processes, such as doing thinking, word selection, and displaying understanding. CPs are receptive to these uses of silence and allow more time if the PWA signals it is required.

The novel findings of this study are positive for PWA, demonstrating that their communicative capabilities can overcome their impacted speech and that they possess more resources than previous research has indicated. The findings also demonstrate that the healthcare guidance requires further development so that it acknowledges the variable impact of aphasia on PWA’s use of silences, and the preserved communicative abilities of PWA.