In this paper, I address the question of how interactions with deaf youth and their hearing interlocutors are able to unfold in economical and fluid ways despite the existence of sensory and communicative asymmetries. Bringing together ethnographic insights from two years of fieldwork in Iquitos, Peru with the microanalysis of moments of situated…

Studies of interaction in speaking assessment have highlighted problems regarding the unequal distribution of interaction patterns in interviews versus paired formats (Van Lier, 1989; Young & He, 1998). These studies, however, only looked at verbal interaction features, and no attempts in these studies were made to investigate both verbal and…

This study investigates a particular behavior in talk-in-interaction that appears to be, at least in its most explicit form, relatively unique to children, that is, the behavior whereby one participant explicitly instructs another participant to say a specific phrase, after which the first participant then supplies a prefashioned response. Rather…

This paper describes how early childhood teachers' incorporation of pauses raises the quality of talk-in-interaction during play-based mathematics activities. Responses of both children and teachers are shown to be more contingent and expansive when conversations include protracted pauses than during interactions in which pauses are largely…

An investigation of turn-taking during conversations between speech-handicapped adults with cerebral palsy and normally speaking adults found that interactants used available behaviors to signal turn exchanges and that most control rested with the normal speaker. Handicapped speakers were frequently unsuccessful at interaction management and in…

To elucidate natural spoken conversation as a genre type, the characteristics of dyadic discourse as a "communicative genre" is focused on by examining the primary intent of utterances and the four phases of the dominant exchange structure via an interactive functional analysis of an extensive database of ordinary conversations (student,…

In an attempt to better understand the quality of interprofessional relationships, research used a confirmation/disconfirmation framework to analyze communication in nurse-physician dyads. Results indicated that nurses and physicians were primarily confirming in their interaction. (SRT)

In order to investigate speech accommodation--the way in which communicators influence each other's speaking patterns and rhythms--a study examined its occurrence, as well as the extent of a conversational partner's influence, and the influence of interpersonal uncertainty and differences in arousal level upon that accommodation process.…

Suggests that imagined interactions serve several functions including rehearsal for anticipated encounters. Indicates that imagined interactions tend to occur before real interactions, are dominated by the self, and are equally pleasant and unpleasant. (JK)

To identify conditions that make a conversational interaction constructive--in the sense that the participants can find the way toward the success of what they wanted to accomplish--two situations were examined. In one, a professional researcher explained her data to a statistician. In the other, three groups of two people cooperated with each…

Examines the impact of communication apprehension (CA) and interaction structure on participants' perceptions and behavior during initial interactions. Finds that high and low CA males perceived their female interaction partners differently, while females reported less satisfying interactions in the structured versus unstructured condition. (SR)

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)

A study was conducted to describe the speech patterns of four adolescent girls. All four subjects were in the same eighth grade class and knew each other. Approximately 19 hours of observational data and 9 hours of interview data were collected. The descriptive framework of D. Hymes (1972), which focuses specifically on settings, participants,…

Assessed the relationship of conversational involvement and loneliness among college students. Found that lonely participants in this study had lower rates of talkativeness, interruptions, and attention than the nonlonely; they were also perceived as less involved and less interpersonally attractive. (PD)

The amount and intelligibility of spoken language output were evaluated in 15 deaf children (ages 4 to 9 years) during 15 minutes of free play with either their mothers or a hearing peer. Results indicated that significantly more speech was produced during the children's interactions with their mothers. (Author/DB)