Dr Traci Walker
BA, MA, PhD
Human Communication Sciences, School of Allied Health Professions, Nursing and Midwifery
Senior Lecturer
+44 114 222 2420
Full contact details
Human Communication Sciences, School of Allied Health Professions, Nursing and Midwifery
362 Mushroom Lane
Sheffield
S10 2TS
- Profile
-
I received my MA and PhD in Linguistics from the University of Colorado, after which I relocated the UK and took up a post as a Research Assistant at the University of York. I was an RCUK Fellow in Communication and Language Use in Interaction from 2007-2012, moving on to a lecturer post which I held till joining the Department of Human Communication Sciences at the University of Sheffield as a Senior Lecturer in September 2015.
My research investigates the function and use of linguistic structures in communication within typical and atypical populations. All my work is grounded in an interest in discovering the order and structure of language in everyday use. To that end, I work with recordings (both video and audio) of naturally-occurring interactions, combining the methods of Conversation Analysis with more traditional means of linguistic analysis.
- Research interests
-
- Application of conversation analysis to interactions on acute care wards between people with aphasia and healthcare professionals
- The manipulation of fine phonetic detail to achieve particular outcomes in interaction
- Integrating theories of semantics and pragmatics with what really goes on in everyday talk
- The form and functions of self- and other-repetition
Collaborators
- Prof Markus Reuber (University of Sheffield)
- Prof Paul Drew (University of Loughborough)
- Dr Gareth Walker (University of Sheffield)
- Publications
-
Books
Edited books
Journal articles
- Differentiating between epileptic and functional/dissociative seizures using semantic content analysis of transcripts of routine clinic consultations. Epilepsy & Behavior, 143, 109217-109217.
- #3079 Investigating the feasibility of automating the differential diagnosis of transient loss of consciousness. Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 92(8), a7-a7.
- Feasibility of using an automated analysis of formulation effort in patients’ spoken seizure descriptions in the differential diagnosis of epileptic and nonepileptic seizures. Seizure, 91, 141-145.
- 26 Can an automated assessment of language help distinguish between Functional Cognitive Disorder and early neurodegeneration?. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 91(8), e18.2-e19.
- On the potential of phonetic analysis to distinguish between people with epilepsy and non-epileptic seizures. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 30(1), 92-109. View this article in WRRO
- View this article in WRRO
- Dementia detection using automatic analysis of conversations. Computer Speech and Language, 53, 65-79. View this article in WRRO
- Developing an intelligent virtual agent to stratify people with cognitive complaints: A comparison of human-patient and intelligent virtual agent-patient interaction.. Dementia. View this article in WRRO
- Lexical repetitions and repair initiation in mother-child talk. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 2(1), 49-73. View this article in WRRO
- ‘But what is the reason why you know such things?’: Question and response patterns in the LADO interview. Journal of Pragmatics, 129, 154-172. View this article in WRRO
- 'What 'form' does informal assessment take? A scoping review of the informal assessment literature for aphasia. The International Journal of Disorders of Language and Communication. View this article in WRRO
- PO029 An avatar aid in memory clinic. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 88(Suppl 1), A19.4-A20.
- Phonetic and sequential differences of other-repetitions in repair initiation. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 50(4), 330-347. View this article in WRRO
- Toward the Automation of Diagnostic Conversation Analysis in Patients with Memory Complaints. Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, 58(2), 373-387. View this article in WRRO
- Displays and claims of understanding in conversation by people with aphasia. Aphasiology, 30(6), 750-764. View this article in WRRO
- Form ≠ Function: The Independence of Prosody and Action. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 47(1), 1-16. View this article in WRRO
- The Independence of Phonetic Form and Interactional Accomplishments. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 47(1), 23-27. View this article in WRRO
- Managing Problems of Acceptability Through High Rise-Fall Repetitions. Discourse Processes, 50(2), 107-138. View this article in WRRO
- Catastrophising and normalising in patient's accounts of their seizure experiences. Seizure, 21(10), 795-801.
- Responding indirectly. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(9), 2434-2451.
- Going too far: Complaining, escalating and disaffiliation. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(12), 2400-2414.
- Contingency and Action: A Comparison of Two Forms of Requesting. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 41(2), 129-153.
- Offers of assistance: Constraints on syntactic design. Journal of Pragmatics, 38(8), 1257-1280.
- Repetition and the prosody-pragmatics interface. Journal of Pragmatics, 38(10), 1721-1751. View this article in WRRO
- Practices in Other-Initiated Repair Resolution: The Phonetic Differentiation of 'Repetitions'. Discourse Processes, 39(1), 1-43.
- Action formation, ascription, and the talk of people with aphasia. Journal of Interactional Research in Communication Disorders, 14(2), 292-311.
- Understanding the autonomy of adults with impaired capacity through dialogue. Journal of Medical Ethics.
Chapters
- Phonetic resources in the construction of social actions, Studies in Language and Social Interaction (pp. 277-312). John Benjamins Publishing Company
- Self-repair and action construction, Conversational Repair and Human Understanding (pp. 71-94).
- Advances in Discourse Studies Routledge
Conference proceedings papers
- Predicting Levels of Depression and Anxiety in People with Neurodegenerative Memory Complaints Presenting with Confounding Symptoms. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, Vol. 285 (pp 58-69)
- Fully automated cognitive screening tool based on assessment of speech and language. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, Vol. 92(1) (pp 12-15)
- A fully automated cognitive screening tool based on assessment of speech and language. Alzheimer's & Dementia, Vol. 16(S6) View this article in WRRO
- Computational Cognitive Assessment: Investigating the Use of an Intelligent Virtual Agent for the Detection of Early Signs of Dementia. ICASSP 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 12 May 2019 - 17 May 2019.
- An Avatar-based system for identifying individuals likely to develop dementia. Interspeech 2017 (pp 3147-3151) View this article in WRRO
- Diagnosing people with dementia using automatic conversation analysis. Proceedings of Interspeech 2016 (pp 1220-1224) View this article in WRRO
- Acoustic Feature Extraction with Interpretable Deep Neural Network for Neurodegenerative Related Disorder Classification. Interspeech 2020
- Improving Cognitive Impairment Classification by Generative Neural Network-Based Feature Augmentation. Interspeech 2020
- Detecting Signs of Dementia Using Word Vector Representations. Interspeech 2018
Working papers
Preprints
- View this article in WRRO