Seedfuning project: Following competence in atypical interaction across contexts

People with language impairments such as people living with autism or acquired brain injury are faced with significant communicative challenges that limit them in fully participating in every day interactions. There is an increasing recognition for the need to empower these people to more independent living and research has shown that intervention is most effective if started already in childhood. Especially, professionals in educational and therapeutic settings aim to strengthen the children’s communication and social competences for a more independent living. In psychology, communicative impairments have traditionally been understood within a cognitive model addressing processes inside the individual as well as from a deficit perspective. In linguistics and logopedics, the focus has traditionally been on the problems in speech production. Accordingly research as well as diagnostic practices have focused on the individual performing in isolation within a testing or clinical context and on uncovering deficits compared to 'normal' performance. Existing research still has a strong focus on verbal language, which is actually the communicative resource that people with communication impairments have difficulties in expressing. In recent years, a new perspective on communicative impairment that focuses on interactional contexts in which language is regarded as an action in the lived social world has emerged from scholars within sociology, applied linguistics, and discursive and cultural psychology in the US, the UK and some Scandinavian countries. This view of ’Atypcial Interaction’ aims at studying individuals in concrete interactional context and takes a multimodal and resource-oriented approach. Language is understood as an embodied practice comprising multiple modalities (gestures, voice quality, gaze, etc.). The field has brought about astonishing new insights about the communicative abilities (rather than disabilities) of individuals with communicative impairment, which are much more complex then the traditional perspective on cognitive processes suggests. Little is still known, however, on how this approach can be applied to challenges that children with communicative impairment are faced with in institutional settings and how the use of communication technologies or other interactive technologies can improve their participation in face-to-face interaction.
The aim of this collaboration therefore is to bring together renowned scholars from applied linguistics, sociology, psychology, educational science, and technology studies in order to identify the concrete needs these participants are faced with and to jointly prepare an interdisciplinary and international research proposal. More specifically, the project will investigate common procedures in speech therapy as well as in daily interaction in rehabilitation/educational centers for children with communication disorders, as for example with autism and brain injury. The desired outcome will be to support children with communicative impairments in their cognitive and social abilities to become as independent as possible in their everyday live. Experts from sociology and applied linguistics contribute with promising methodological procedures rooted in ethnomethodology and multi-modal video analysis to study social interaction. Experts from psychology will add insights into how intersubjectivity is achieved in children with communicative impairments. Educational scientists provide knowledge on scaffolding children’s communicative abilities in complex environments. Scholars from technology studies provide insights in recent technological developments and possibilities (and limits) of multimodal resources that can be used to enhance children’s communicative skills. A joint collaboration of all of these disciplines in close exchange with practitioners in the field is hence necessary to successfully implement and evaluate new intervention programs. This knowledge will be made available not only to scientific community but also to the wider field of practitioners in therapy and in the educational system. The research proposal will be prepared in the following way: 2 1/2 day workshop with international and national experts in February 2018 at AAU. Moreover, a person from the fundraising office will be invited to support the applicants in preparing a research proposal for specific funding agencies. The workshop will address the following topics:
•How can we theoretically, but also methodologically, approach various multimodal resources used by children with limited communicative resources?
•How can a multimodal perspective help to understand and improve scaffolding and guiding practices that enable a more independent living for children with communication disorders?
•Interplay of social situation, multimodal resources and children’s use of assistive technologies as well as technologies of everyday live.

This interdisciplinary collaboration was funded by the Faculty of Humanities at Aalborg University.