Shifting granularity: the case of correction and aphasia

Aphasia is a language disorder caused by acquired brain damage. It can have a profound impact on language processing and communication in everyday life. One of its specific implications for conversation is that it changes how people with aphasia design and develop their turns using “turn-constructional units” (TCUs). This chapter addresses TCUs as locus for focused collaboration between people with aphasia and their familiar conversation partners. We explore how familiar conversation partners solicit talk from people with aphasia using test questions (i.e., known-answer questions) and designedly incomplete utterances (DIUs). We argue that, although they may appear paedagogical, these actions and practices are more proximally related to scaffolding the participation of people with aphasia in ways that are consistent with normative expectations for speaking in interaction.