The Use of Conversational Repairs in Interactions Involving People With Parkinson's Disease: A Large Corpus...

Interlocutors engage in acts of conversational repair to resolve trouble sources, or communication breakdowns. This is necessary for successful communication, allowing interlocutors to establish and maintain common ground. Here, we investigated the use of conversational repairs in the conversations of people with Parkinson's disease (PD) and concomitant dysarthria.

Conversational repairs were coded in a large corpus of 114 conversations involving a person with PD and a neurotypical (NT) partner (NT-PD dyads) and a comparison corpus of 80 conversations involving two NT partners (NT-NT dyads). Conversations varied across two contextual dimensions: conversational goal (informational vs. relational) and partner familiarity (familiar vs. unfamiliar).

Over the course of 10-min conversations, NT-PD and NT-NT dyads produced a similar number of conversational repairs; however, NT-PD dyads exhibited higher usage of repairs per conversational turn. In addition, dyads involving participants with PD with moderate dysarthria showed different repair patterns relative to dyads involving participants with PD with mild or mild-moderate dysarthria as well as NT-NT dyads-the key being that they used fewer self-initiated and more other-initiated repairs. Across all dyads, informational conversations had more repairs than relational conversations, and dyads involving participants with PD with moderate dysarthria relied more heavily on other-initiated repairs when conversing with a familiar partner relative to an unfamiliar partner.

The use of repairs in the conversations of people with PD differs from that in NT-NT conversations. The key is that the conversations of people with PD have a greater number of repairs per conversational turn and the distribution of repairs differs when people with PD have more pronounced intelligibility impairments. Additionally, the study provides empirical support for longstanding claims regarding the use of repairs in NT-NT dyads as well as claims from case study conversations involving people with dysarthria.