Norén, N., & Sigurd Pilesjö, M. (2016). Supporting a child with multiple disabilities to participate in social interaction: The case of asking a question. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 30(10), 790–811. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699206.2016.1213883
This study examined the multiparty interaction in which a speech language therapist supported a 10-year-old girl with multiple disabilities (i.e., cerebral palsy, moderate intellectual disability) in asking a question with a communication board while her grandparents were present. The sequential organization included the following social actions: 1) establishing action, speaker, and recipient; 2) authoring the topic of the question; 3) summoning the recipient, asking the question, and answering; 4) commenting and assessing the answer. The speech and language therapist created either public or private participation frameworks (e.g., excluding grandparents from hearing the nature of the question) for each of the question-oriented tasks, designing slots for student participation using embodied resources or the communication board. Through an extended pre-sequence with a trajectory of actions, the communication partners used meta-interactive turns and embodied modeling (i.e., embody different key aspects of asking a question with different participation frameworks) to support the aided speaker’s selection of speakership (i.e., who is asking the question), recipiency (i.e., the person to be asked a question), topic, and action type (i.e., asking a question), and they were attentive and responsive to her embodied communication.