Stickle2015

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Stickle2015
BibType PHDTHESIS
Key Stickle2015
Author(s) Trini Stickle
Title Epistemic Stance Markers and the Function of “I Don’t Know” in the Talk of Persons with Dementia and Children with Autism
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Epistemics, Dementia, Autism, Child mental health, Children with disabilities, Alzheimer's
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Year 2015
Language English
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School University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Howpublished
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Abstract

This study examines epistemic stance marker use in the talk of persons with mid to late stages of dementia of the probable Alzheimer's type and in children with autism. I report the forms and frequencies of all epistemic stance markers used in naturally-occurring conversations between 20 persons with dementia and their non-impaired co-participants, and I compare the resultant 25-conversation corpus of 33,000 words, derived from 4 hours, 51 minutes of audio, to existing corpora. Overall, persons with dementia use a common variety of epistemic stance markers with frequencies comparable to other corpora, to include the conversation register of the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English . Moreover, conversation analysis shows that persons with dementia use I don't know , the most frequent stance marker, much the same way as non-impaired persons: to display epistemic stance but also to manage sequences of talk (i.e. closing or initiating topics) and to manage preference (e.g., disagreeing with co-participants).

A separate conversation analysis of naturally-elicited talk by seven children, ages 6-13, undergoing clinical evaluation for autism spectrum disorder focuses on their use of I don't know in response to emotion-related questions from the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS-II). While some of these children do use I don't know to display epistemic stance and to signal more talk is forthcoming, more often they use I don't know to, in effect, resist providing information requested by the clinicians. In a few of these cases, I observe that the syntactic interrogatory construction "What about/How about" may unintentionally elicit I don't know utterances relative to that of other question formulations. Two additional observations likely have import to conversation, in general. I show that American English speakers, like British speakers reported elsewhere, also use I don't know in response to compliments to minimize a co-participant's positive assessment and to avoid self-praise. I also look at a mechanism that is at work within sequence management in which a person with dementia uses a complement-taking I don't know utterance as a first-pair part to initiate an action that I call a "wondering".

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