Spelling as a Last Resort: The Use of Spelling in Workplace Interaction by Speakers with a Speech Impairment

Abstract

Workplace interactions include varied and complex types of talk oriented toward not only the tasks workers are accomplishing but also toward relationship building among colleagues. This chapter will address the strategies used by assistive and augmentative communication (AAC) device users to interact with their coworkers. AAC users rely on spontaneous novel utterance generation (SNUG) in order to produce speech using their devices, as prestored text is difficult to program for workplace discourse. As a result, producing speech through typing or eye tracking takes a considerable amount of time and reduces their effectiveness in real-time communication. Using the AAC and Non-AAC Workplace Corpus (Pickering and Bruce, AAC and Non-AAC Workplace Corpus (ANAWC). [collection of electronic texts] 2009) and conversation analysis (CA) methodology, this chapter will discuss and illustrate an AAC user’s production of spelling as a strategy to communicate effectively. This strategy is used together with the coparticipants to negotiate meaning.

Transcription Conventions

[ ] = (0.5) (.) . , ? : ↑ word °word° •hhh hhh (( )) ( ) (word) {word}

overlapping talk the two lines connected by the equal signs are continuous talk silence timed in tenths of a second micro pause of less than 0.2 seconds falling intonation continuing intonation rising intonation lengthened sound marked rising shift of intonation emphasis quieter talk inbreath outbreath transcriber’s notes uninterpretable speech uncertainty about the words in parenthesis spelled letters talk produced using VOCA