Conversation Analysis

Conversation analysis is a method for the empirical study of conversation and other forms of talk-in-interaction that, over the last 50 years, has developed into arguably the primary approach to the study of spontaneous human verbal and [Page 490]nonverbal behavior. Since the 1990s, it has been used to investigate a number of communication disorders to analyze their impact on everyday conversation and other forms of social interaction.

This subfield of CA has been termed atypical interaction since it analyzes interactions in which, due to the communication disorder of one or more of the participants, the interaction is regularly in some way atypical compared with that of “normal” (or “typical”) interactions—that is, those conducted by participants without communication disorders or other linguistic or other communicative limitations. This ...