Conversation Patterns between Children with Severe Speech Impairment and their Conversation Partners in Dyadic and Multi-person Interactions

Abstract Active engagement in interactions is crucial for the development of identity, social competence, and cognitive abilities. For children with severe speech impairment (SSI) who have little or no intelligible speech, active participation conversations challenging can be critical their inclusion participation. The present study investigated conversational patterns emerging from between SSI use aided communication typically speaking conversation partners (CPs) explored whether was different numbers (dyadic versus multi-person interactions). An unusually large multilingual dataset used (N = 85 conversations). This allowed us to systematically investigate discourse analysis measures indicating participation: distribution control (initiations responses recodes) summoning power (obliges comments). findings suggest that (i) were characterized by asymmetrical CPs assuming most (ii) noticeably more symmetric compared dyadic, as children’s significantly increased. Clinical implications best practice recommendations are discussed.