Stickle2015
| Stickle2015 | |
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| 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 |
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| Tag(s) | EMCA, Epistemics, Dementia, Autism, Child mental health, Children with disabilities, Alzheimer's |
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| Year | 2015 |
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| URL | Link |
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| School | University of Wisconsin - Madison |
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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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