According to research in pragmatics, gender represents an important factor in individuals' turn-taking behaviour, with results indicating overall male-dominated conversational patterns. Despite the significance of gender in the students' conversational styles in an academic setting, gender and turn-taking has yet to be investigated in the foreign…

Silence as a communicative act in face-to-face spontaneous interaction has been under-investigated in linguistic politeness research in Thailand. With the recent increase in the influx of foreign students gaining admission into Thai universities yearly, the result is that such universities will be a coexistence of cultures. This study therefore…

Background: It is known that dysarthria arising from Parkinson's disease may affect intelligibility in conversational interaction. Research has also shown that Parkinson's disease may affect cognition and cause word-retrieval difficulties and pragmatic problems in the use of language. However, it is not known whether or how these…

This dissertation takes an ethnomethodologically-grounded, conversation-analytic approach in investigating the sequential deployment of linguistic resources in Spanish-language talk-in-interaction. Three sets of resources are examined: 2nd-person singular reference forms (tú, vos, usted), indicative/subjunctive verbal mood selection, and…

Attempts to demonstrate that the discourse strategies of high-involved and low-involved communicators exhibit the same systematic pattern in managing pragmatic resources in conversation as previously demonstrated for the management of textual resources in conversation. (MS)

This study of the pragmatic characteristics of conversations between mothers and their 30 preschool children with developmental delays found significant differences between naturally occurring and researcher-introduced semistructured situations in the proportions of conversational turns taken and the pragmatic functions of mothers' and children's…

This paper examines issues in establishing an initial social/communicative repertoire with individuals who have severe to profound disabilities, with emphasis on intervention involving the most severely affected. The paper stresses the importance of beginning intervention efforts even before learners show intentional behavior and discrimination of…