Ashley Rudser, “Laughter in Aided Interaction: A Key Factor in Repairing Miscommunications”
Mentor: Patricia Mayes, English
Oral Presentation Block 1

Conversation analysis has investigated multiple facets of the practices of social interaction and everyday conversation, but the demands of conversation for people with cerebral palsy that use other methods to communicate—such as writing with a pen and paper or using a text-to-speech device—are not as widely researched in comparison. This project examines the micro-level practices conversational participants use to repair miscommunications that occur in the context of aided speech. To do this, three instances of miscommunications have been extracted from conversations involving a person with cerebral palsy and a person without a communication disability. These extracts were analyzed to determine how the miscommunication is repaired. I should note that “repair” is a technical term used for actions, whether verbal or gestural, that participants take to resolve miscommunications. The focus here is specifically on one kind of action: laughter. I explore how laughter operates in terms of where it occurs in the repair process, which participant initiates it, and how the interlocutor responds. It was found that laughter functioned in three ways: to initiate and complete repairs, to frame linguistic non-competence as laughable rather than a long and unsuccessful attempt at completing a repair sequence, and to improve communicative effectiveness and understandability. The parameters of these functions varied with conversational context, yet laughter always contained informative signals that went beyond the linguistic content of the interaction. Identifying this information is a crucial step that keeps social interaction moving forward, allowing participants to achieve their joint communicative purposes. Understanding how laughter functions can also be used to better facilitate communication and understanding between people with communication disabilities and the people they interact with every day, including caregivers, clinicians, and educators.