Your injury, my accident: talking at cross-purposes in rehabilitation after traumatic brain injury.

Primary Objective: To explore how traumatic brain injury (TBI) rehabilitation staff and adults who have sustained TBI refer during clinical interaction to the precipitating event.

Design: Interviews conducted during the initial assessment phase of TBI rehabilitation were examined using Conversation Analysis.

Participants: Participants were nine men and one woman, all of whom had sustained TBI of sufficient severity to warrant referral for community rehabilitation.

Inflexibility as an interactional phenomenon: Using conversation analysis to re-examine a symptom of autism.

Many accounts of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) imply that the condition's behavioural 'symptoms' are direct reflexes of underlying deficits. In doing so, however, they invariably overlook the social contexts in which symptomatic behaviours occur and are identified as pathological. This study addresses this issue, using conversation analysis (CA) to examine the emergence of inflexibility, a behavioural trait symptomatic of ASD, during play involving an adult and diagnosed child.

The co-development of speech and gesture in children with autism.

Recent interest in gesture has led to an understanding of the development of gesture and speech in typically developing young children. Research suggests that initially gesture and speech form two independent systems which combine together temporally and semantically before children enter the two-word period of language development. However, little is known about gesture development in children's disordered speech.

Linguistic heterogeneity in Williams syndrome.

Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic disorder resulting from a deletion on chromosome 7. A number of studies have shown that individuals with WS have a superior linguistic profile compared to their non-verbal abilities, however the evidence has been inconclusive, as many studies have disputed such a profile. The vast majority of studies on WS have assumed a single, homogeneous WS linguistic profile in order to support various theoretical viewpoints.

The interactional significance of formulas in autistic language.

The phenomenon of echolalia in autistic language is well documented. Whilst much early research dismissed echolalia as merely an indicator of cognitive limitation, later work identified particular discourse functions of echolalic utterances. The work reported here extends the study of the interactional significance of echolalia to formulaic utterances.