Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, July–August 2014; 28(7–8): 590–601 ß 2014 Informa UK Ltd. ISSN: 0269-9206 print / 1464-5076 online DOI: 10.3109/02699206.2014.926995
Linguistic recycling in typical and atypical interaction
MICHAEL R. PERKINS Department of Human Communication Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK (Received 25 March 2014; accepted 10 May 2014)
Abstract I present evidence that linguistic ‘‘recycling’’ – i.e., the redeployment of linguistic material from prior utterances during conversation – is a striking and prevalent feature not only of interaction between typical speakers, but also, and notably, of interaction involving the communication impaired. In the latter case, recycling may sometimes be used as a compensatory communicative resource when linguistic ability is compromised. Despite its prevalence, however, recycling has largely been ignored by clinical linguists. In addition to providing illustrations of linguistic recycling across a range of communication disorders, I also examine how it is subserved by phenomena such as priming, short-term memory and alignment. I subsequently argue for a shift in perspective that puts recycling at the heart of our perception of how typical and atypical interaction works, and suggest a number of potential benefits for clinical linguistics, ranging from the way we understand and analyse communication disorders to how we assess and treat them.
Keywords: Alignment, interaction, linguistic recycling, memory, priming
Introduction In this article, I wish to draw attention to a phenomenon that has received scant attention in clinical linguistics, but which, in my view, could potentially make a significant contribution not only to our understanding of atypical communication but also to its assessment and treatment. The phenomenon in question, which I will term ‘‘linguistic recycling’’, derives from the finding that the form and content of our utterances during conversation is dependent to a remarkable degree on prior utterances, both our own and those of others, and both the immediately preceding ones and those less recent. Put briefly, linguistic recycling is the strategic use of prior linguistic material for communicative purposes. Although, as we shall see, there is a widespread appreciation by psycholinguists, discourse analysts, conversation analysts, and others of certain specific aspects of the contiguity, dependency and synchronisation that can exist between current and prior utterances, I will argue first that such relations have rarely been viewed in terms of ‘‘recycling’’ (as the term is being used here) and second that this particular perspective has great relevance for our understanding of atypical interaction.
Correspondence: Michael R. Perkins, Department of Human Communication Sciences, University of Sheffield, 362 Mushroom Lane, Sheffield S10 2TS, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
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I begin by providing a clinical example of linguistic recycling, followed by a brief review of the way in which different disciplines have construed the various mechanisms that appear to contribute to recycling. I then discuss a number of ways in which clinical linguistics could benefit if linguistic recycling were taken on board as an integral feature of both typical and atypical interactions.
An illustration of linguistic recycling In 2012, my colleagues and I published a case study of Lucy, a young girl with a developmental speech and language disorder, who frequently used an idiosyncratic rhythmic gesture (RG) of a type not previously reported (Howard, Perkins, & Sowden, 2012). The study showed that although this gesture type appeared to be a stand-alone feature of Lucy’s interaction with others, it was in fact just one component of a multimodal signalling system and was used in an attempt to counteract – sometimes successfully, but sometimes not – processing pressure experienced elsewhere in the system. For example, RG was frequently used when Lucy attempted more syntactically complex utterances, although this was usually at the expense of her spoken rhythm and word juncture, which displayed immature features not present on other occasions. Lucy’s RG was, in fact, a by-product of interactions involving not only syntax, speech rhythm and word juncture, but also other gesture types, pragmatics, discourse, visual processing and processing demands more generally. Of particular relevance to the current theme of recycling, however, is just one minor section of the article (Howard et al., 2012, p. 900–901) in which we examined a small number of apparent counterexamples to the trend of RGs co-occurring with more complex syntax. Compared with Lucy’s gesture-free utterances, which had an MLU (a mean length of utterance) of 2.15, those accompanied by RG were significantly more syntactically complex, with an MLU of 4.05. However, for a small subset of utterances with an MLU of 4, not only was RG absent but also in some cases their rhythm and word juncture were strikingly adult like. This was a real puzzle – the solution to which only eventually emerged when instead of considering each utterance in isolation, we examined its prior conversational context. What we found in such cases was that at least one word or phrase of Lucy’s utterance had already been used in one or more of the immediately preceding two conversational turns, either by her adult interlocutor or by Lucy herself, and sometimes by both. The ‘‘recycled’’ portions of such utterances could range from an immediate repetition (e.g., Adult interlocutor: here’s a lady going for a walk; Lucy: lady going for a walk) to cases where variants of the components of Lucy’s utterance were present in several preceding utterances. An example of the latter case is illustrated in Figure 1. Lucy’s ‘‘I don’t have dinner at school’’ was, for her, a strikingly mature utterance, not only in terms of its lexis and syntax but also its phonology, phonetics and prosody. In the absence of any of the other factors which usually facilitated such mature productions (e.g., the use of RG and/or other gestures, presence of supporting visual stimuli), the only apparent explanation was that in such cases Lucy’s language production was being effectively ‘‘primed’’ by prior linguistic material. Once we noticed this, we started to find evidence of the same kind of recycling in a wide range of other data samples, and we now systematically take account of prior utterances when analysing clinical data. Part of the reason we missed it in the first place is that in standard speech and language assessments, the tendency is to focus on the production and comprehension of words and sentences in isolation. The fact that both the form and the content of an utterance in ordinary conversation are strongly influenced by prior utterances has been largely ignored. I will argue later that linguistic recycling is so fundamental a feature of both typical and atypical interactions that it needs to be moved to centre stage. First, though, I will provide a brief overview of various ways in
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Figure 1. Recycling of prior linguistic material in ‘‘I don’t have dinner at school’’.
which the relationship between current and prior utterances has been approached, either directly or incidentally, across a range of academic disciplines. Factors relevant to linguistic recycling: a brief overview Although the notion of linguistic recycling as an active communicative strategy has rarely been a primary focus of research, the various ways in which utterances may be linked has been fairly extensively researched. What follows is a brief overview of those aspects of particular relevance to recycling.
Discourse cohesion and coherence Discourse analysts have always been sensitive to the links between current and prior linguistic forms, and to how a particular stretch of discourse ‘‘hangs together’’ in terms of how its individual components link both to one other (‘‘cohesion’’) and to the context in which the discourse occurs (‘‘coherence’’). Such links range from intra-sentential anaphora (e.g., The eagle spread its wings), through the way information is presented across a series of utterances (e.g., depending on whether it is ‘‘given’’ or ‘‘new’’) to the structuring of larger stretches of discourse in terms of topic flow (e.g., through the use of lexical ‘‘chaining’’ or ‘‘discourse particles’’ such as however) or the more formal thematic organisation of stories and speeches. Some have pointed out that spoken discourse tends to be more repetitive than written discourse since it is more economical in processing terms to repeat what has already been said than to construct a novel form from scratch (e.g., Brown & Yule, 1983). However, the notion of recycling as such is not a central one in discourse analysis, except insofar as repeated, partially repeated or otherwise modified forms contribute to overall coherence.
‘‘Progressivity’’ in conversation A great deal of what is termed discourse analysis focuses on ‘‘texts’’, or the final products of linguistic behaviour. In contrast, some approaches such as Conversation Analysis examine
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conversational discourse as it actually unfolds turn by turn, and the way in which each participant displays their orientation to what has been said in the prior turn. This could include take-up – or avoidance – of prior forms, although once again any notion of recycling what has been said would tend to be seen as secondary to a more primary interactional function such as ‘‘progressivity’’ (i.e., moving the conversation on) (e.g., Schegloff, 2007). Furthermore, Conversation Analysis focuses primarily on immediately adjacent turns, rather than on more distal utterance links.
Priming A key notion within psychology of relevance to linguistic recycling is ‘‘priming’’. In language processing, priming refers to the process whereby the production or perception of a particular linguistic form – e.g., lexical, syntactic or phonological – facilitates the subsequent production and comprehension of the same, or a similar, form (Pickering & Ferreira, 2008). This has been shown to be the case both in the short term (e.g., immediate repetition), medium term (e.g., topic continuity) and long term (e.g., in language learning1). Priming is clearly very closely intertwined with memory, and in fact, commonly made distinctions such as short-term and long-term memory provide a useful framework for mapping out the different time domains across which linguistic recycling can occur. Short-term memory (STM) temporarily holds items for processing by ‘‘working memory’’ (WM) which transfers representations to and from long-term memory (LTM), which comprises a store of items such as words, constructions, events, procedures, and general world knowledge. As regards the recycling of prior linguistic material, an immediately prior item has the scope to be repeated verbatim with great phonetic accuracy (cf. Gathercole & Baddeley’s, 1993, ‘‘phonological loop’’), whereas more temporally distant items will require some kind of mediation via WM. In the present context, though, it should be noted that priming is almost exclusively studied within the experimental paradigm, which rarely considers its manifestation in ordinary conversation.
Alignment While priming has been traditionally seen as a type of implicit learning mechanism within the individual (e.g., Bock’s, 1986, heightened activation account which argued that the more a structure is used, the greater the likelihood of its subsequent use), a more recent influential approach has argued that the ultimate role of priming is to facilitate ‘‘alignment’’ between individuals during interaction. This so-called ‘‘interactive alignment account’’ (Pickering & Garrod, 2004) argues that conversational success depends on both partners homing in on each other’s linguistic productions and continually making their own more similar at all linguistic levels. Alignment occurs at a particular linguistic level when interlocutors come to share a common underlying representation. This is underpinned by a priming mechanism which makes it more likely that an interlocutor will produce an utterance which uses that representation. The resulting dialogue is increasingly repetitious, with expressions tending to become shorter, and harder to recognise when heard in isolation by others not involved in the conversation. Participants in effect create a temporary linguistic ecosystem unique to them on this specific occasion. One feature of this ecosystem is the tendency for certain variable forms and expressions to become
1 Although there is no space to discuss it here, there is now an extensive literature within the usage-based paradigm which examines the way in which language acquisition is heavily dependent on prior usage over a long time span (see Lieven & Tomasello, 2008, for an overview).
594 M. R. Perkins temporarily fixed for the duration of the interaction – what Pickering and Garrod (2004) refer to as ‘‘routinisation’’ and others as ‘‘formulaicity’’ (Wray & Perkins, 2000). Some care should be taken here over the term ‘‘alignment’’, as its meaning differs across disciplines. Whereas for Pickering and Garrod alignment is explained in terms of internal psychological mechanisms without which interaction cannot occur, conversation analysts see alignment purely in terms of social actions by individuals which enable interaction to progress. For example, in Conversation Analysis, the utterance of ‘‘uh huh’’ by one speaker during another speaker’s narrative would be seen as aligning by virtue of its facilitating the other speaker’s narrative, whereas an interruption such as ‘‘hang on’’ would be seen as disaligning by virtue of obstructing the continuation of the other’s narrative (Barth-Weingarten, 2011; Stivers, 2008). A further take on the notion of alignment is that of Giles and colleagues (e.g., Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991) whose ‘‘communication accommodation theory’’ focuses on the sociological determinants of interaction. ‘‘Convergence’’ – i.e., alignment – of speech, language and gesture between interlocutors is seen in terms of reducing social differences, whereas ‘‘divergence’’ – i.e., disalignment – is seen as motivated by the desire to emphasise such differences. While not denying that alignment – in its various guises – is a key aspect of human interaction, the notion of recycling, although related, is somewhat distinct in that its primary emphasis is not on alignment itself but on the way in which each individual refashions prior utterances to further their own communicative agenda. A final point to make about Pickering and Garrod’s (2004) interactive alignment account is that, as noted above with regard to priming, virtually all work undertaken within this research paradigm is experimentally based and uses non-spontaneous, pre-designed stimuli. Little attention has been paid to naturally occurring conversational interaction.
Summary To summarise, a great deal of research in different disciplines has examined the relationship between current and prior linguistic materials. The links have been variously viewed as the following:
a means of linking the current utterance to elements of earlier utterances in order to create discourse cohesion and/or coherence (discourse analysis); a means of ‘‘progressing’’ conversational interaction (Conversation Analysis); a means of establishing and maintaining ‘‘alignment’’ between speakers (interactive alignment account).
Psychological accounts see such links as being specifically subserved by the cognitive mechanism of priming, and by memory more generally, while others have pointed out possible sociological determinants (communication accommodation theory). While drawing on all these accounts, the focus of this article differs from them in that it views prior linguistic material as a key strategic resource that speakers automatically make use of whether their communicative ability is typical or atypical. Its agenda, which specifically targets clinical linguistics, is to argue that if we wish to describe, explain and understand someone’s communicative behaviour, any account we provide will be incomplete and potentially skewed unless we systematically take into account the way in which their current utterance actively draws on their own and others’ prior utterances. In research on communication disorders, this is rarely done. In the next section, I provide further illustrations of linguistic recycling and consider several areas of clinical linguistics which could potentially benefit by taking on board the notion of linguistic recycling.
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Linguistic recycling and its import for clinical linguistics Recycling as a communicative resource As we saw in the case of Lucy, the girl with specific language impairment (SLI) described earlier, recently used lexical and syntactic material enables her to construct sentences of greater complexity and sophistication than when such material is lacking. To put it another way, one might say that by enhancing her level of performance in this way she is thereby compensating for her difficulties in constructing sentences from scratch. I have described a comparable case elsewhere (Perkins, 2007) in which the linguistic performance of Peter, a 9½-year-old boy with complex high-level communication problems, varied considerably across situations. One determinant of his variability was the availability of prior linguistic material. For example, although his output often comprised simple sentences, sometimes containing syntactic and semantic errors and delivered dysfluently partly due to word-finding problems, on occasion he was capable of producing what for him were remarkably mature sentences – syntactically and lexically complex, and spoken fluently, as in the following example (Perkins, 2007, p. 167): the man who’s got yellow hair wants to go out with the yellow-haired lady and the boy who’s got yellow hair wants to go out with the red-haired lady . and the man with red hair wants to go out with the lady who’s got yellow hair
One key factor here is his obvious redeployment of the same words and constructions from sentence to sentence. But in addition, we also need to know that this example is Peter’s response to the ninth item on a test of formal operational thinking (British Ability Scales, Elliott, Murray, & Pearson, 1977) in which all the preceding items have made use of the same pictures, thus affording Peter the opportunity to rehearse the same structures over and over (compare, for example, his response to the first item on the test: ‘‘the boys is red hair and the girls is yellow hair’’). Taking into account Peter’s ability to recycle prior material sheds a whole new light on his performance, particularly its variability. The recycling of one’s own and also other’s utterances appears to be prevalent across a wide range of communication disorders. A further example of the former can be found in Tarling, Perkins and Stojanovik’s (2006) case study of a 12-year-old boy with Williams syndrome, in which we found that about 25% of his utterances contained self-repetitions such as the following: I got (.) I got a big I got a big Sylv (.) Sylvester
His solution to his problems with sentence formulation is to construct a sentence – and even individual words – incrementally, adding new components at each reiteration until he achieves what he appears to consider an adequate result.2 Although recycling is a powerful resource, it is only one factor among many which contributes towards communicative success. In the following extract (from Perkins, 2007, p. 127), W, a 74-year-old man with expressive and receptive aphasia, recycles both his own utterances and those of his interlocutor (T) but is still hampered by his lexical retrieval difficulties. T W
so what did you make? what did the factory make? what did we make was not a lot because we only made things for the thing that were [unintelligible] so we all made things that were out out . out of our um things
2 In Conversation Analysis, this would be described as self-initiated self-repair. Schegloff (1987) also uses the term ‘‘recycling’’, but in a far more restricted sense, to refer to instances of overlapping talk in which a speaker repeats the overlapped element in his subsequent turn. He refers to these as ‘‘recycled turn beginnings’’.
596 M. R. Perkins T W
what was it . kind of selling then rather than making things? no . we’re selling . taking out taking out the taking out of the [unintelligible] . no can’t do that . taking out of the selling
In fact, it may even be that T’s proffering of the word selling actually hampers, rather than helps, him as suggested by his use of no prior to taking it up, and then subsequently abandoning it. A particular striking example of the recycling of others’ utterances, found in some individuals with autism and referred to as echolalia, involves the verbatim repetition of all or part of an interlocutor’s prior utterance. For many years, echolalia was seen as an automatic, noncommunicative behaviour, but has more recently been re-evaluated in a number of CA studies as a form of subtle linguistic recycling with a range of clear communicative goals (e.g., Dobbinson, Perkins, & Boucher, 2003; Local & Wootton, 1995; Sterponi & Shankey, 2014). For example, Local and Wootton (1995) showed how the immediate echoes of an 11-year-old boy with autism varied subtly but systematically in terms of their linguistic, rhythmic and prosodic features in order to signal either his acquiescence or resistance to his interlocutor’s behavioural directives. Furthermore, his interlocutor clearly demonstrated their orientation to this distinction. Pickering and Garrod (2004, p. 188) briefly mention the possibility of interactive alignment being disrupted in people with autism as a result of problems with social functioning, but they cite no actual evidence or published research in support of this view. However, if we focus on recycling, rather on alignment per se, there is indeed evidence that people with autism are able to process prior utterances but in a somewhat anomalous manner. We have already seen this above in the extreme case of echolalia, but there are at least hints that far more of the atypicality found in the spoken output of people with autism may be linked to recycling. Figure 2 (from Perkins, Dobbinson, Boucher, Bol, & Bloom, 2006, p. 802) shows an interaction in which a researcher (*RES) is assessing an adult with autism (*GAR) using the WISC-R IQ test. If we consider *GAR’s final utterance in isolation, or as a response to *RES’s previous turn, it appears not only pragmatically inappropriate but also grammatically ill-formed and semantically odd. But if we look back further, there is at least a suggestion (indicated by the arrows) that *GAR’s utterance may in fact be amalgamated from components of prior utterances across several turns. Although it is not evident from this one instance what the communicative function of *GAR’s final utterance might be, the clear evidence of his linguistic recycling suggests that this is something that merits further systematic analysis.
Recycling in the face of poor memory skills Linguistic recycling is crucially dependent on memory. As we have just seen, good STM skills can be used to compensate for problems with language formulation by reusing prior linguistic material instead of constructing sentences entirely from scratch. What happens to recycling, though, when
Figure 2. Recycling in autism.
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Figure 3. Recycling in traumatic brain injury.
memory is impaired? One major consequence is what is commonly perceived as repetitiveness. Repetitiveness comes in many guises, ranging from the continuous repetition of the same word, as in the following example of palilalia: This is August, August, August, August, August . . .
(Ibayashi, Tanaka, Peng, Joanette, & Lecours, 1992, p. 243) to problems with topic perseveration or topic ‘‘drift’’ in longer stretches of talk, for example in conditions such as autism and right hemisphere brain damage (for an overview, see Perkins, 1994). Although the particular memory mechanism may vary, it is possible to regard linguistic repetitiveness generally as the persistence of recycling in the face of impaired memory ability. Figure 3 provides an extract of continuous speech by a man with traumatic brain injury (TBI) (Perkins, Body, & Parker, 1995, p. 300) which shows how sudden and abrupt shifts in topic may be triggered through the recycling of elements of the prior utterance when recall of their content is lacking.3 This phenomenon, sometimes described as a type of ‘‘recurrent perseveration’’, is also observed in dementia (e.g., Bayles, Tomoeda, Kaszniak, Stern, & Eagans, 1985). A more subtle instance of topic drift is shown in the following example, from the conversation of the same man with TBI (from Perkins et al., 1995, p. 304): I admit this government we’ve got is not doing a good job – but the unions are trying to make them sound worse than what but they are – cos I’m a Tory actually – but I I do vote – if there’s a communist bloke there I will vote communist – but it all depends what his principles are – but I don’t agree with the Chinese communism – and the Russian communism – but I believe every should be equal – but I’m not knocking the royal family because – you need them and they they bring people in to see – take photos
In this stepwise shift from the topic of government to trade unions to Tory, communism, Chinese/Russian communism, equality, royal family and finally tourism, each individual link is unexceptionable yet there is a lack of overall coherence because of an apparent inability to link each current topic back more than a couple of steps due to poor recall. In short, in these and other such cases, what we are seeing is the outcome of a robust recycling ability, faced with inadequate provision of prior linguistic material due to poor STM.
3 His free recall of information on the Rivermead Memory Test (Wilson, Cockburn, & Baddeley, 1985) was very poor, and recognition memory for verbal information was at a chance level.
598 M. R. Perkins Recycling and assessment Standardised assessments for speech and language pathology are widely seen as the gold standard on account of their assumed operational objectivity, exclusion of influences such as individual tester bias and their independence of contextual factors generally. This has remained the case despite a persistent strand of research in the social sciences over many years which has shown that even the most formal test procedures inevitably involve at least a degree of subjective negotiation between tester and testee (Maynard & Marlaire, 1992; Muskett, Perkins, & Body, 2012). However, if the influence of recycling is to be taken seriously, standardised assessments would appear ill suited to picking it up given their deliberate exclusion of prior context and opportunities for rehearsal and repetition. As we have seen above, qualitative approaches such as Conversation Analysis, which deliberately targets interaction and sequence, are far better equipped to deal with linguistic recycling, and indeed there are several CA studies which show how performance on language tests is the result of active ongoing collaboration between tester and testee and that each response is strongly influenced by the preceding dialogue (e.g., Beeke, Wilkinson, & Maxim, 2003; Muskett, Body, & Perkins, 2013). However, as far as I am aware, there is as yet no formal assessment procedure which explicitly targets linguistic recycling as it is being considered in this article. Nonetheless, if one did wish to assess recycling ability using standardised tests, one could at least approach this indirectly by targeting the various underlying mechanisms involved, such as STM and priming, for which a wide range of formal assessments are available. Let us briefly reconsider, for example, the case of Lucy, the girl with SLI whose ability to recycle prior utterances contributed to enhanced linguistic production. Other than via systematic analysis of the antecedents for each utterance in the three preceding conversational turns (i.e., the ad hoc analytical procedure actually used in that study), are there any alternative formal procedures that might allow us to assess this ability – albeit indirectly? One possible contender is the use of sentence repetition (SR),4 an elicited imitation procedure used to assess STM, which is seen as a major clinical marker of SLI. In fact, some recent SR studies of memory in SLI do appear to suggest that STM may play a greater – i.e., compensatory – role in linguistic performance for children with SLI than is the case for their typically developing peers. In a study of 6-year-old children with SLI, Riches (2012) found their linguistic ability to be strongly predicted by a priming task whereas it was a poor predictor in their language-matched peers – i.e., ‘‘the children with SLI, lacking WM resources, may have been more dependent on phonological STM as a mechanism to support recall’’ (Riches, 2012, p. 508). Similarly, Hesketh and Conti-Ramsden (2013) found that in 7–11-year-olds, phonological STM was a strong predictor of SR performance for children with SLI though not for their typically developing peers. However, it cannot be emphasised too strongly that experimentally based procedures such as SR, which use pre-designed stimuli in laboratory conditions, are methodologically ill suited to capturing the characteristics of linguistic recycling as it unfolds naturally in ordinary conversation. SR, after all, does no more than target the ability to imitate a sentence that has been read aloud, which is a far cry from the complexities involved in the ongoing monitoring of one’s own, and others’, prior speech during conversation, while simultaneously selecting, redeploying and perhaps refashioning various sections during the production of one’s current utterance in order to meet specific strategic communicative goals.
4 In the context of their work on interactive alignment discussed earlier, Pickering and Garrod (2004, p. 182) suggest that ‘‘sentence recall might actually present a reasonable analogue to production in naturalistic dialogue’’.
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Recycling and intervention A final area where the role of recycling is acknowledged – at least implicitly and informally – is clinical intervention. Interactions between clinician and client commonly involve processes such as prompting (e.g., initiating a target for the client to complete) and modelling (e.g., providing the entire target form for the client to repeat) on the part of the clinician which do, albeit indirectly, acknowledge the client’s ability to monitor and recycle prior utterances. However, the incremental recycling by both conversational participants of each other’s talk across longer stretches of talk is rarely explicitly targeted as a therapeutic resource to be exploited in clinical intervention. Experimental studies have tended to focus instead on priming, to establish, for example, whether the repetition of particular words and structures is likely to facilitate their subsequent production. In a study of adults with Broca’s aphasia by Hartsuiker and Kolk (1998), it was found that participants who were required to repeat sentences with specific structures (e.g., passive and prepositional dative) were more likely to use such structures subsequently during the same therapy block. Interestingly, as was the case with the SLI studies mentioned in the previous section, the participants with aphasia exhibited stronger priming effects than neurotypical controls, which once again suggests that the ability to recycle is a particularly powerful compensatory resource for the linguistically impaired. However, there would appear to be considerable scope for developing intervention strategies which do specifically acknowledge the client’s ability to recycle. Consider, for example, the way that collaborative word searches work, as illustrated in the following conversational extract (from Oelschlaeger & Damico, 2000, p. 213) in which Ed, a man with aphasia, is talking to family members M and MG about what happened when he had his stroke: Ed: M: Ed: M: Ed: MG: Ed: M: Ed:
What do you call it (2.1) the uhMRI? No Angioplasty? No EEG? No (1.5) The irr, no (tsk, tsk) srays, what do you call it? (1.0) An X-ray? X-ray
The word search involves an extended turn sequence which is finally resolved when M offers ‘‘X-ray’’ as the possible target of Ed’s ‘‘srays’’, which Ed then confirms by repeating M’s version. Recent work in Conversation Analysis has focused on longer exchanges such as this in order to examine which conversational practices best serve the needs of specific communication-impaired individuals and their conversational partners (e.g., Wilkinson, 2011). Results of the analysis are subsequently shared with the participants in order to develop conversational strategies which are optimal for their own individual circumstances. Although recycling as such has not been singled out for specific attention in this approach, it is certainly implicitly acknowledged as a part of the interactional process. Conversation Analysis would thus appear to provide a promising framework for assessing the potential role of recycling in intervention.
Conclusion My aim in this article has been to show how linguistic recycling is a central feature of communication in clinical populations that is often overlooked, and to argue for a shift in perspective that puts recycling at the heart of our perception of how conversational
600 M. R. Perkins interaction works. In doing so, I am aware that simply providing illustrations of the phenomenon is no more than a first step, although a necessary one in what I hope to have shown to be a very promising direction for future research. A central reason why recycling has been overlooked for so long is the tendency to focus on the production and comprehension of utterances in isolation, rather than in their natural habitat of ordinary conversation. In recent years, though, qualitative research methods such as Conversation Analysis as well as experimental approaches such as the interactive alignment paradigm have transferred attention to the dyad, rather than the individual, as the primary locus for understanding how communication works. A corresponding shift in focus in the cognitive sciences from individual minds to ‘‘dialogism’’ (Linell, 2009) and ‘‘cognitionfor-interaction’’ (Levinson, 2006) has also provided fertile ground for reconsidering language production and comprehension as an incremental process that depends on and redeploys prior linguistic material. Clinical linguistics likewise stands to gain considerable benefit from including linguistic recycling as a key component of its analytical and theoretical toolkit.
Declaration of interest The author reports no conflict of interest.
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Maynard, D. W., & Marlaire, C. L. (1992). Good reasons for bad testing performance: The interactional substrate of educational exams. Qualitative Sociology, 15, 177–202. Muskett, T., Body, R., & Perkins, M. (2013). A discursive psychology critique of semantic verbal fluency assessment and its interpretation. Theory & Psychology, 23, 205–226. Muskett, T., Perkins, M. R., & Body, R. (2012). Uncovering the dynamic in static assessment interaction. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 28, 87–99. Oelschlaeger, M. L., & Damico, J. S. (2000). Partnership in conversation: A study of word search strategies. Journal of Communication Disorders, 33, 205–225. Perkins, M. R. (1994). Repetitiveness in language disorders: A new analytical procedure. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 8, 321–336. Perkins, M. R. (2007). Pragmatic impairment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perkins, M. R., Body, R., & Parker, M. (1995). Closed head injury: Assessment and remediation of topic bias and repetitiveness. In M. R. Perkins & S. J. Howard (Eds.), Case studies in clinical linguistics (pp. 293–320). London: Whurr. Perkins, M. R., Dobbinson, S., Boucher, J., Bol, S., & Bloom, P. (2006). Lexical knowledge and lexical use in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 36, 795–805. Pickering, M. J., & Ferreira, V. S. (2008). Structural priming: A critical review. Psychological Bulletin, 134, 427–459. Pickering, M. J., & Garrod, S. (2004). Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27, 169–226. Riches, N. G. (2012). Sentence repetition in children with specific language impairment: An investigation of underlying mechanisms. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 47, 499–510. Schegloff, E. A. (1987). Recycled turn beginnings: A precise repair mechanism in conversation’s turn-taking organisation. In G. Button & J. R. E. Lee (Eds.), Talk and social organisation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sterponi, L., & Shankey, J. (2014). Rethinking echolalia: Repetition as interactional resource in the communication of a child with autism. Journal of Child Language, 41, 275–304. Stivers, T. (2008). Stance, alignment, and affiliation during storytelling: When nodding is a token of affiliation. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 41, 31–57. Tarling, K., Perkins, M. R., & Stojanovik, V. (2006). Conversational success in Williams syndrome: Communication in the face of cognitive and linguistic limitations. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 20, 583–590. Wilkinson, R. (2011). Changing interactional behavior: Using conversation analysis in intervention programmes for aphasic conversation. In C. Antaki (Ed.), Applied conversation analysis: Intervention and change in institutional talk (pp. 32–53). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilson, B. A., Cockburn, J., & Baddeley, A. (1985). Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test. Suffolk: Thames Valley Test Company. Wray, A., & Perkins, M. R. (2000). The functions of formulaic language: An integrated model. Language & Communication, 20, 1–28.
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Linguistic recycling in typical and atypical interaction
MICHAEL R. PERKINS Department of Human Communication Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK (Received 25 March 2014; accepted 10 May 2014)
Abstract I present evidence that linguistic ‘‘recycling’’ – i.e., the redeployment of linguistic material from prior utterances during conversation – is a striking and prevalent feature not only of interaction between typical speakers, but also, and notably, of interaction involving the communication impaired. In the latter case, recycling may sometimes be used as a compensatory communicative resource when linguistic ability is compromised. Despite its prevalence, however, recycling has largely been ignored by clinical linguists. In addition to providing illustrations of linguistic recycling across a range of communication disorders, I also examine how it is subserved by phenomena such as priming, short-term memory and alignment. I subsequently argue for a shift in perspective that puts recycling at the heart of our perception of how typical and atypical interaction works, and suggest a number of potential benefits for clinical linguistics, ranging from the way we understand and analyse communication disorders to how we assess and treat them.
Keywords: Alignment, interaction, linguistic recycling, memory, priming
Introduction In this article, I wish to draw attention to a phenomenon that has received scant attention in clinical linguistics, but which, in my view, could potentially make a significant contribution not only to our understanding of atypical communication but also to its assessment and treatment. The phenomenon in question, which I will term ‘‘linguistic recycling’’, derives from the finding that the form and content of our utterances during conversation is dependent to a remarkable degree on prior utterances, both our own and those of others, and both the immediately preceding ones and those less recent. Put briefly, linguistic recycling is the strategic use of prior linguistic material for communicative purposes. Although, as we shall see, there is a widespread appreciation by psycholinguists, discourse analysts, conversation analysts, and others of certain specific aspects of the contiguity, dependency and synchronisation that can exist between current and prior utterances, I will argue first that such relations have rarely been viewed in terms of ‘‘recycling’’ (as the term is being used here) and second that this particular perspective has great relevance for our understanding of atypical interaction.
Correspondence: Michael R. Perkins, Department of Human Communication Sciences, University of Sheffield, 362 Mushroom Lane, Sheffield S10 2TS, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
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I begin by providing a clinical example of linguistic recycling, followed by a brief review of the way in which different disciplines have construed the various mechanisms that appear to contribute to recycling. I then discuss a number of ways in which clinical linguistics could benefit if linguistic recycling were taken on board as an integral feature of both typical and atypical interactions.
An illustration of linguistic recycling In 2012, my colleagues and I published a case study of Lucy, a young girl with a developmental speech and language disorder, who frequently used an idiosyncratic rhythmic gesture (RG) of a type not previously reported (Howard, Perkins, & Sowden, 2012). The study showed that although this gesture type appeared to be a stand-alone feature of Lucy’s interaction with others, it was in fact just one component of a multimodal signalling system and was used in an attempt to counteract – sometimes successfully, but sometimes not – processing pressure experienced elsewhere in the system. For example, RG was frequently used when Lucy attempted more syntactically complex utterances, although this was usually at the expense of her spoken rhythm and word juncture, which displayed immature features not present on other occasions. Lucy’s RG was, in fact, a by-product of interactions involving not only syntax, speech rhythm and word juncture, but also other gesture types, pragmatics, discourse, visual processing and processing demands more generally. Of particular relevance to the current theme of recycling, however, is just one minor section of the article (Howard et al., 2012, p. 900–901) in which we examined a small number of apparent counterexamples to the trend of RGs co-occurring with more complex syntax. Compared with Lucy’s gesture-free utterances, which had an MLU (a mean length of utterance) of 2.15, those accompanied by RG were significantly more syntactically complex, with an MLU of 4.05. However, for a small subset of utterances with an MLU of 4, not only was RG absent but also in some cases their rhythm and word juncture were strikingly adult like. This was a real puzzle – the solution to which only eventually emerged when instead of considering each utterance in isolation, we examined its prior conversational context. What we found in such cases was that at least one word or phrase of Lucy’s utterance had already been used in one or more of the immediately preceding two conversational turns, either by her adult interlocutor or by Lucy herself, and sometimes by both. The ‘‘recycled’’ portions of such utterances could range from an immediate repetition (e.g., Adult interlocutor: here’s a lady going for a walk; Lucy: lady going for a walk) to cases where variants of the components of Lucy’s utterance were present in several preceding utterances. An example of the latter case is illustrated in Figure 1. Lucy’s ‘‘I don’t have dinner at school’’ was, for her, a strikingly mature utterance, not only in terms of its lexis and syntax but also its phonology, phonetics and prosody. In the absence of any of the other factors which usually facilitated such mature productions (e.g., the use of RG and/or other gestures, presence of supporting visual stimuli), the only apparent explanation was that in such cases Lucy’s language production was being effectively ‘‘primed’’ by prior linguistic material. Once we noticed this, we started to find evidence of the same kind of recycling in a wide range of other data samples, and we now systematically take account of prior utterances when analysing clinical data. Part of the reason we missed it in the first place is that in standard speech and language assessments, the tendency is to focus on the production and comprehension of words and sentences in isolation. The fact that both the form and the content of an utterance in ordinary conversation are strongly influenced by prior utterances has been largely ignored. I will argue later that linguistic recycling is so fundamental a feature of both typical and atypical interactions that it needs to be moved to centre stage. First, though, I will provide a brief overview of various ways in
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Figure 1. Recycling of prior linguistic material in ‘‘I don’t have dinner at school’’.
which the relationship between current and prior utterances has been approached, either directly or incidentally, across a range of academic disciplines. Factors relevant to linguistic recycling: a brief overview Although the notion of linguistic recycling as an active communicative strategy has rarely been a primary focus of research, the various ways in which utterances may be linked has been fairly extensively researched. What follows is a brief overview of those aspects of particular relevance to recycling.
Discourse cohesion and coherence Discourse analysts have always been sensitive to the links between current and prior linguistic forms, and to how a particular stretch of discourse ‘‘hangs together’’ in terms of how its individual components link both to one other (‘‘cohesion’’) and to the context in which the discourse occurs (‘‘coherence’’). Such links range from intra-sentential anaphora (e.g., The eagle spread its wings), through the way information is presented across a series of utterances (e.g., depending on whether it is ‘‘given’’ or ‘‘new’’) to the structuring of larger stretches of discourse in terms of topic flow (e.g., through the use of lexical ‘‘chaining’’ or ‘‘discourse particles’’ such as however) or the more formal thematic organisation of stories and speeches. Some have pointed out that spoken discourse tends to be more repetitive than written discourse since it is more economical in processing terms to repeat what has already been said than to construct a novel form from scratch (e.g., Brown & Yule, 1983). However, the notion of recycling as such is not a central one in discourse analysis, except insofar as repeated, partially repeated or otherwise modified forms contribute to overall coherence.
‘‘Progressivity’’ in conversation A great deal of what is termed discourse analysis focuses on ‘‘texts’’, or the final products of linguistic behaviour. In contrast, some approaches such as Conversation Analysis examine
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conversational discourse as it actually unfolds turn by turn, and the way in which each participant displays their orientation to what has been said in the prior turn. This could include take-up – or avoidance – of prior forms, although once again any notion of recycling what has been said would tend to be seen as secondary to a more primary interactional function such as ‘‘progressivity’’ (i.e., moving the conversation on) (e.g., Schegloff, 2007). Furthermore, Conversation Analysis focuses primarily on immediately adjacent turns, rather than on more distal utterance links.
Priming A key notion within psychology of relevance to linguistic recycling is ‘‘priming’’. In language processing, priming refers to the process whereby the production or perception of a particular linguistic form – e.g., lexical, syntactic or phonological – facilitates the subsequent production and comprehension of the same, or a similar, form (Pickering & Ferreira, 2008). This has been shown to be the case both in the short term (e.g., immediate repetition), medium term (e.g., topic continuity) and long term (e.g., in language learning1). Priming is clearly very closely intertwined with memory, and in fact, commonly made distinctions such as short-term and long-term memory provide a useful framework for mapping out the different time domains across which linguistic recycling can occur. Short-term memory (STM) temporarily holds items for processing by ‘‘working memory’’ (WM) which transfers representations to and from long-term memory (LTM), which comprises a store of items such as words, constructions, events, procedures, and general world knowledge. As regards the recycling of prior linguistic material, an immediately prior item has the scope to be repeated verbatim with great phonetic accuracy (cf. Gathercole & Baddeley’s, 1993, ‘‘phonological loop’’), whereas more temporally distant items will require some kind of mediation via WM. In the present context, though, it should be noted that priming is almost exclusively studied within the experimental paradigm, which rarely considers its manifestation in ordinary conversation.
Alignment While priming has been traditionally seen as a type of implicit learning mechanism within the individual (e.g., Bock’s, 1986, heightened activation account which argued that the more a structure is used, the greater the likelihood of its subsequent use), a more recent influential approach has argued that the ultimate role of priming is to facilitate ‘‘alignment’’ between individuals during interaction. This so-called ‘‘interactive alignment account’’ (Pickering & Garrod, 2004) argues that conversational success depends on both partners homing in on each other’s linguistic productions and continually making their own more similar at all linguistic levels. Alignment occurs at a particular linguistic level when interlocutors come to share a common underlying representation. This is underpinned by a priming mechanism which makes it more likely that an interlocutor will produce an utterance which uses that representation. The resulting dialogue is increasingly repetitious, with expressions tending to become shorter, and harder to recognise when heard in isolation by others not involved in the conversation. Participants in effect create a temporary linguistic ecosystem unique to them on this specific occasion. One feature of this ecosystem is the tendency for certain variable forms and expressions to become
1 Although there is no space to discuss it here, there is now an extensive literature within the usage-based paradigm which examines the way in which language acquisition is heavily dependent on prior usage over a long time span (see Lieven & Tomasello, 2008, for an overview).
594 M. R. Perkins temporarily fixed for the duration of the interaction – what Pickering and Garrod (2004) refer to as ‘‘routinisation’’ and others as ‘‘formulaicity’’ (Wray & Perkins, 2000). Some care should be taken here over the term ‘‘alignment’’, as its meaning differs across disciplines. Whereas for Pickering and Garrod alignment is explained in terms of internal psychological mechanisms without which interaction cannot occur, conversation analysts see alignment purely in terms of social actions by individuals which enable interaction to progress. For example, in Conversation Analysis, the utterance of ‘‘uh huh’’ by one speaker during another speaker’s narrative would be seen as aligning by virtue of its facilitating the other speaker’s narrative, whereas an interruption such as ‘‘hang on’’ would be seen as disaligning by virtue of obstructing the continuation of the other’s narrative (Barth-Weingarten, 2011; Stivers, 2008). A further take on the notion of alignment is that of Giles and colleagues (e.g., Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991) whose ‘‘communication accommodation theory’’ focuses on the sociological determinants of interaction. ‘‘Convergence’’ – i.e., alignment – of speech, language and gesture between interlocutors is seen in terms of reducing social differences, whereas ‘‘divergence’’ – i.e., disalignment – is seen as motivated by the desire to emphasise such differences. While not denying that alignment – in its various guises – is a key aspect of human interaction, the notion of recycling, although related, is somewhat distinct in that its primary emphasis is not on alignment itself but on the way in which each individual refashions prior utterances to further their own communicative agenda. A final point to make about Pickering and Garrod’s (2004) interactive alignment account is that, as noted above with regard to priming, virtually all work undertaken within this research paradigm is experimentally based and uses non-spontaneous, pre-designed stimuli. Little attention has been paid to naturally occurring conversational interaction.
Summary To summarise, a great deal of research in different disciplines has examined the relationship between current and prior linguistic materials. The links have been variously viewed as the following:
a means of linking the current utterance to elements of earlier utterances in order to create discourse cohesion and/or coherence (discourse analysis); a means of ‘‘progressing’’ conversational interaction (Conversation Analysis); a means of establishing and maintaining ‘‘alignment’’ between speakers (interactive alignment account).
Psychological accounts see such links as being specifically subserved by the cognitive mechanism of priming, and by memory more generally, while others have pointed out possible sociological determinants (communication accommodation theory). While drawing on all these accounts, the focus of this article differs from them in that it views prior linguistic material as a key strategic resource that speakers automatically make use of whether their communicative ability is typical or atypical. Its agenda, which specifically targets clinical linguistics, is to argue that if we wish to describe, explain and understand someone’s communicative behaviour, any account we provide will be incomplete and potentially skewed unless we systematically take into account the way in which their current utterance actively draws on their own and others’ prior utterances. In research on communication disorders, this is rarely done. In the next section, I provide further illustrations of linguistic recycling and consider several areas of clinical linguistics which could potentially benefit by taking on board the notion of linguistic recycling.
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Linguistic recycling and its import for clinical linguistics Recycling as a communicative resource As we saw in the case of Lucy, the girl with specific language impairment (SLI) described earlier, recently used lexical and syntactic material enables her to construct sentences of greater complexity and sophistication than when such material is lacking. To put it another way, one might say that by enhancing her level of performance in this way she is thereby compensating for her difficulties in constructing sentences from scratch. I have described a comparable case elsewhere (Perkins, 2007) in which the linguistic performance of Peter, a 9½-year-old boy with complex high-level communication problems, varied considerably across situations. One determinant of his variability was the availability of prior linguistic material. For example, although his output often comprised simple sentences, sometimes containing syntactic and semantic errors and delivered dysfluently partly due to word-finding problems, on occasion he was capable of producing what for him were remarkably mature sentences – syntactically and lexically complex, and spoken fluently, as in the following example (Perkins, 2007, p. 167): the man who’s got yellow hair wants to go out with the yellow-haired lady and the boy who’s got yellow hair wants to go out with the red-haired lady . and the man with red hair wants to go out with the lady who’s got yellow hair
One key factor here is his obvious redeployment of the same words and constructions from sentence to sentence. But in addition, we also need to know that this example is Peter’s response to the ninth item on a test of formal operational thinking (British Ability Scales, Elliott, Murray, & Pearson, 1977) in which all the preceding items have made use of the same pictures, thus affording Peter the opportunity to rehearse the same structures over and over (compare, for example, his response to the first item on the test: ‘‘the boys is red hair and the girls is yellow hair’’). Taking into account Peter’s ability to recycle prior material sheds a whole new light on his performance, particularly its variability. The recycling of one’s own and also other’s utterances appears to be prevalent across a wide range of communication disorders. A further example of the former can be found in Tarling, Perkins and Stojanovik’s (2006) case study of a 12-year-old boy with Williams syndrome, in which we found that about 25% of his utterances contained self-repetitions such as the following: I got (.) I got a big I got a big Sylv (.) Sylvester
His solution to his problems with sentence formulation is to construct a sentence – and even individual words – incrementally, adding new components at each reiteration until he achieves what he appears to consider an adequate result.2 Although recycling is a powerful resource, it is only one factor among many which contributes towards communicative success. In the following extract (from Perkins, 2007, p. 127), W, a 74-year-old man with expressive and receptive aphasia, recycles both his own utterances and those of his interlocutor (T) but is still hampered by his lexical retrieval difficulties. T W
so what did you make? what did the factory make? what did we make was not a lot because we only made things for the thing that were [unintelligible] so we all made things that were out out . out of our um things
2 In Conversation Analysis, this would be described as self-initiated self-repair. Schegloff (1987) also uses the term ‘‘recycling’’, but in a far more restricted sense, to refer to instances of overlapping talk in which a speaker repeats the overlapped element in his subsequent turn. He refers to these as ‘‘recycled turn beginnings’’.
596 M. R. Perkins T W
what was it . kind of selling then rather than making things? no . we’re selling . taking out taking out the taking out of the [unintelligible] . no can’t do that . taking out of the selling
In fact, it may even be that T’s proffering of the word selling actually hampers, rather than helps, him as suggested by his use of no prior to taking it up, and then subsequently abandoning it. A particular striking example of the recycling of others’ utterances, found in some individuals with autism and referred to as echolalia, involves the verbatim repetition of all or part of an interlocutor’s prior utterance. For many years, echolalia was seen as an automatic, noncommunicative behaviour, but has more recently been re-evaluated in a number of CA studies as a form of subtle linguistic recycling with a range of clear communicative goals (e.g., Dobbinson, Perkins, & Boucher, 2003; Local & Wootton, 1995; Sterponi & Shankey, 2014). For example, Local and Wootton (1995) showed how the immediate echoes of an 11-year-old boy with autism varied subtly but systematically in terms of their linguistic, rhythmic and prosodic features in order to signal either his acquiescence or resistance to his interlocutor’s behavioural directives. Furthermore, his interlocutor clearly demonstrated their orientation to this distinction. Pickering and Garrod (2004, p. 188) briefly mention the possibility of interactive alignment being disrupted in people with autism as a result of problems with social functioning, but they cite no actual evidence or published research in support of this view. However, if we focus on recycling, rather on alignment per se, there is indeed evidence that people with autism are able to process prior utterances but in a somewhat anomalous manner. We have already seen this above in the extreme case of echolalia, but there are at least hints that far more of the atypicality found in the spoken output of people with autism may be linked to recycling. Figure 2 (from Perkins, Dobbinson, Boucher, Bol, & Bloom, 2006, p. 802) shows an interaction in which a researcher (*RES) is assessing an adult with autism (*GAR) using the WISC-R IQ test. If we consider *GAR’s final utterance in isolation, or as a response to *RES’s previous turn, it appears not only pragmatically inappropriate but also grammatically ill-formed and semantically odd. But if we look back further, there is at least a suggestion (indicated by the arrows) that *GAR’s utterance may in fact be amalgamated from components of prior utterances across several turns. Although it is not evident from this one instance what the communicative function of *GAR’s final utterance might be, the clear evidence of his linguistic recycling suggests that this is something that merits further systematic analysis.
Recycling in the face of poor memory skills Linguistic recycling is crucially dependent on memory. As we have just seen, good STM skills can be used to compensate for problems with language formulation by reusing prior linguistic material instead of constructing sentences entirely from scratch. What happens to recycling, though, when
Figure 2. Recycling in autism.
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Figure 3. Recycling in traumatic brain injury.
memory is impaired? One major consequence is what is commonly perceived as repetitiveness. Repetitiveness comes in many guises, ranging from the continuous repetition of the same word, as in the following example of palilalia: This is August, August, August, August, August . . .
(Ibayashi, Tanaka, Peng, Joanette, & Lecours, 1992, p. 243) to problems with topic perseveration or topic ‘‘drift’’ in longer stretches of talk, for example in conditions such as autism and right hemisphere brain damage (for an overview, see Perkins, 1994). Although the particular memory mechanism may vary, it is possible to regard linguistic repetitiveness generally as the persistence of recycling in the face of impaired memory ability. Figure 3 provides an extract of continuous speech by a man with traumatic brain injury (TBI) (Perkins, Body, & Parker, 1995, p. 300) which shows how sudden and abrupt shifts in topic may be triggered through the recycling of elements of the prior utterance when recall of their content is lacking.3 This phenomenon, sometimes described as a type of ‘‘recurrent perseveration’’, is also observed in dementia (e.g., Bayles, Tomoeda, Kaszniak, Stern, & Eagans, 1985). A more subtle instance of topic drift is shown in the following example, from the conversation of the same man with TBI (from Perkins et al., 1995, p. 304): I admit this government we’ve got is not doing a good job – but the unions are trying to make them sound worse than what but they are – cos I’m a Tory actually – but I I do vote – if there’s a communist bloke there I will vote communist – but it all depends what his principles are – but I don’t agree with the Chinese communism – and the Russian communism – but I believe every should be equal – but I’m not knocking the royal family because – you need them and they they bring people in to see – take photos
In this stepwise shift from the topic of government to trade unions to Tory, communism, Chinese/Russian communism, equality, royal family and finally tourism, each individual link is unexceptionable yet there is a lack of overall coherence because of an apparent inability to link each current topic back more than a couple of steps due to poor recall. In short, in these and other such cases, what we are seeing is the outcome of a robust recycling ability, faced with inadequate provision of prior linguistic material due to poor STM.
3 His free recall of information on the Rivermead Memory Test (Wilson, Cockburn, & Baddeley, 1985) was very poor, and recognition memory for verbal information was at a chance level.
598 M. R. Perkins Recycling and assessment Standardised assessments for speech and language pathology are widely seen as the gold standard on account of their assumed operational objectivity, exclusion of influences such as individual tester bias and their independence of contextual factors generally. This has remained the case despite a persistent strand of research in the social sciences over many years which has shown that even the most formal test procedures inevitably involve at least a degree of subjective negotiation between tester and testee (Maynard & Marlaire, 1992; Muskett, Perkins, & Body, 2012). However, if the influence of recycling is to be taken seriously, standardised assessments would appear ill suited to picking it up given their deliberate exclusion of prior context and opportunities for rehearsal and repetition. As we have seen above, qualitative approaches such as Conversation Analysis, which deliberately targets interaction and sequence, are far better equipped to deal with linguistic recycling, and indeed there are several CA studies which show how performance on language tests is the result of active ongoing collaboration between tester and testee and that each response is strongly influenced by the preceding dialogue (e.g., Beeke, Wilkinson, & Maxim, 2003; Muskett, Body, & Perkins, 2013). However, as far as I am aware, there is as yet no formal assessment procedure which explicitly targets linguistic recycling as it is being considered in this article. Nonetheless, if one did wish to assess recycling ability using standardised tests, one could at least approach this indirectly by targeting the various underlying mechanisms involved, such as STM and priming, for which a wide range of formal assessments are available. Let us briefly reconsider, for example, the case of Lucy, the girl with SLI whose ability to recycle prior utterances contributed to enhanced linguistic production. Other than via systematic analysis of the antecedents for each utterance in the three preceding conversational turns (i.e., the ad hoc analytical procedure actually used in that study), are there any alternative formal procedures that might allow us to assess this ability – albeit indirectly? One possible contender is the use of sentence repetition (SR),4 an elicited imitation procedure used to assess STM, which is seen as a major clinical marker of SLI. In fact, some recent SR studies of memory in SLI do appear to suggest that STM may play a greater – i.e., compensatory – role in linguistic performance for children with SLI than is the case for their typically developing peers. In a study of 6-year-old children with SLI, Riches (2012) found their linguistic ability to be strongly predicted by a priming task whereas it was a poor predictor in their language-matched peers – i.e., ‘‘the children with SLI, lacking WM resources, may have been more dependent on phonological STM as a mechanism to support recall’’ (Riches, 2012, p. 508). Similarly, Hesketh and Conti-Ramsden (2013) found that in 7–11-year-olds, phonological STM was a strong predictor of SR performance for children with SLI though not for their typically developing peers. However, it cannot be emphasised too strongly that experimentally based procedures such as SR, which use pre-designed stimuli in laboratory conditions, are methodologically ill suited to capturing the characteristics of linguistic recycling as it unfolds naturally in ordinary conversation. SR, after all, does no more than target the ability to imitate a sentence that has been read aloud, which is a far cry from the complexities involved in the ongoing monitoring of one’s own, and others’, prior speech during conversation, while simultaneously selecting, redeploying and perhaps refashioning various sections during the production of one’s current utterance in order to meet specific strategic communicative goals.
4 In the context of their work on interactive alignment discussed earlier, Pickering and Garrod (2004, p. 182) suggest that ‘‘sentence recall might actually present a reasonable analogue to production in naturalistic dialogue’’.
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Recycling and intervention A final area where the role of recycling is acknowledged – at least implicitly and informally – is clinical intervention. Interactions between clinician and client commonly involve processes such as prompting (e.g., initiating a target for the client to complete) and modelling (e.g., providing the entire target form for the client to repeat) on the part of the clinician which do, albeit indirectly, acknowledge the client’s ability to monitor and recycle prior utterances. However, the incremental recycling by both conversational participants of each other’s talk across longer stretches of talk is rarely explicitly targeted as a therapeutic resource to be exploited in clinical intervention. Experimental studies have tended to focus instead on priming, to establish, for example, whether the repetition of particular words and structures is likely to facilitate their subsequent production. In a study of adults with Broca’s aphasia by Hartsuiker and Kolk (1998), it was found that participants who were required to repeat sentences with specific structures (e.g., passive and prepositional dative) were more likely to use such structures subsequently during the same therapy block. Interestingly, as was the case with the SLI studies mentioned in the previous section, the participants with aphasia exhibited stronger priming effects than neurotypical controls, which once again suggests that the ability to recycle is a particularly powerful compensatory resource for the linguistically impaired. However, there would appear to be considerable scope for developing intervention strategies which do specifically acknowledge the client’s ability to recycle. Consider, for example, the way that collaborative word searches work, as illustrated in the following conversational extract (from Oelschlaeger & Damico, 2000, p. 213) in which Ed, a man with aphasia, is talking to family members M and MG about what happened when he had his stroke: Ed: M: Ed: M: Ed: MG: Ed: M: Ed:
What do you call it (2.1) the uhMRI? No Angioplasty? No EEG? No (1.5) The irr, no (tsk, tsk) srays, what do you call it? (1.0) An X-ray? X-ray
The word search involves an extended turn sequence which is finally resolved when M offers ‘‘X-ray’’ as the possible target of Ed’s ‘‘srays’’, which Ed then confirms by repeating M’s version. Recent work in Conversation Analysis has focused on longer exchanges such as this in order to examine which conversational practices best serve the needs of specific communication-impaired individuals and their conversational partners (e.g., Wilkinson, 2011). Results of the analysis are subsequently shared with the participants in order to develop conversational strategies which are optimal for their own individual circumstances. Although recycling as such has not been singled out for specific attention in this approach, it is certainly implicitly acknowledged as a part of the interactional process. Conversation Analysis would thus appear to provide a promising framework for assessing the potential role of recycling in intervention.
Conclusion My aim in this article has been to show how linguistic recycling is a central feature of communication in clinical populations that is often overlooked, and to argue for a shift in perspective that puts recycling at the heart of our perception of how conversational
600 M. R. Perkins interaction works. In doing so, I am aware that simply providing illustrations of the phenomenon is no more than a first step, although a necessary one in what I hope to have shown to be a very promising direction for future research. A central reason why recycling has been overlooked for so long is the tendency to focus on the production and comprehension of utterances in isolation, rather than in their natural habitat of ordinary conversation. In recent years, though, qualitative research methods such as Conversation Analysis as well as experimental approaches such as the interactive alignment paradigm have transferred attention to the dyad, rather than the individual, as the primary locus for understanding how communication works. A corresponding shift in focus in the cognitive sciences from individual minds to ‘‘dialogism’’ (Linell, 2009) and ‘‘cognitionfor-interaction’’ (Levinson, 2006) has also provided fertile ground for reconsidering language production and comprehension as an incremental process that depends on and redeploys prior linguistic material. Clinical linguistics likewise stands to gain considerable benefit from including linguistic recycling as a key component of its analytical and theoretical toolkit.
Declaration of interest The author reports no conflict of interest.
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