Clarke, M., & Wilkinson, R. (2010). Communication aid use in children’s conversation: Time, timing and speaker transfer. In H. Gardner & M. Forrester (Eds.), Analysing interactions in childhood: Insights from conversation analysis (pp. 249–266). John Wiley & Sons.
This study examined how progressivity was negotiated during speaker transfer between three student dyads of children with physical disabilities who use communication aids and their peers, aged 7;05 to 14;4. Delays during the pre-beginnings of aided speakers that occurred in response to natural speaker’s turns were treated as relevant, with the natural speaker orienting to the VOCA while waiting in silence. In contrast, pre-beginnings of initiated VOCA-mediated turns were vulnerable to the partner’s co-occurring talk. The co-occurring talk appeared to be motivated by a goal of enhancing progressivity by reducing the demands of the next turn of VOCA-mediated speech through second pair parts of adjacent turns. However, co-occuring talk during pre-beginnings of initiated VOCA-mediated turns that sought to establish the status of talk or negotiate a re-direction ultimately lead to abandonment of the VOCA-initiated-turn.