Atypical interaction: An introduction

Wilkinson, Rae and Rasmussen provide a thorough, state-of-the-art Introduction to the growing field of Atypical Interaction, that is, conversations and other types of social interaction where one of the participants has a communicative impairment or communication disorder. These can include, for example, autism, dementia, learning disability, stammering or hearing impairment. The authors discuss how within this field the method of conversation analysis is used to record, transcribe and analyse these types of social interaction. They describe similarities and differences in the way that the different forms of communicative impairment can impact on social interaction, and they summarise the contribution that work in this areas has made to both communication disorder research and conversation analysis research on the nature of talk and social interaction.