The effects of enactment on communicative competence in aphasic casual conversation: a functional linguistic perspective.
Rimke Groenewold, Elizabeth Armstrong
PMID 29761598WHAT IT FOUND
In one man with aphasia, turns containing enactment were far more likely to be assertive than his other turns.
He used enacted speech to open new topics and hold the floor, rather than just agreeing with his wife.
Key findings
01For the speaker with aphasia, 43 of his 58 enactment moves were coded as assertive, compared with 501 of his 1184 non-enactment moves.
02His assertive enactments were mostly opening moves that started talk on a new proposition, whereas his assertive non-enactments were mostly prolonging continuers that kept negotiating the same point.
03The wife showed no such relationship between enactment and assertiveness, and the speaker with aphasia produced fewer assertive moves overall than his non-brain-damaged partner.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study analysed one man with aphasia and one control speaker. Nothing here generalises to other people, other types of aphasia, or other conversation partners. The authors state the results are not generalizable. Enactment was rare in this dataset, so the relationship rests on 58 moves from one speaker. The authors could not compare this couple's assertiveness patterns to how they talked before his aphasia, so a pre-existing difference between them cannot be ruled out. The coding framework forced all moves into just three assertiveness levels, collapsing any finer differences. The wife's data showed no enactment-assertiveness link, so the pattern may be specific to this man or this couple's dynamic.
Declared interests
The paper is supported by non-U.S. government funding. No conflicts of interest are declared in the supplied text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat this as evidence that enactment therapy works. It is a single-case analysis of one man's natural conversation. It shows that his enacted turns were more assertive than his other turns, but it did not test any intervention, did not measure whether teaching enactment improves outcomes, and included only one speaker with aphasia.