This conversation analytic study explores how an adolescent diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) responded to questions from a parent. Examined were 230 minutes of video-recorded naturally occurring interaction between a mother and her 17-year-old son with ASD and, for purposes of baseline comparison, 20 minutes of interaction between a mother and her typically developing 18-year-old son, as they chatted in their respective homes. Analysis revealed that the adolescent with ASD responded with partial repeats of the previous question or with formulaic (echolalic) utterances. Deeper analysis of the responses that appeared to be echolalic utterances, revealed these to be displays of the boy’s interactional competence. This study suggests that it is only through a fine-grained analysis of response turns that the interactional competence of those diagnosed with ASD can be revealed. We also saw that the mother of the ASD son formulated her questions as polar questions with candidate answers aiding her son to easily construct his answers, highlighting the significance of parental question design in facilitating progress in interaction.

This study analyzes informal triadic conversations taken from a Japanese TV talk show, focusing on three prominent linguistic resources that are frequently observed in Japanese conversation: repetition and paraphrasing of another speaker’s utterance, and co-construction of a sentence/story. The analysis shows that the three resources share some functional features in conversation: they connect speakers’ utterances, ideas, and the speakers themselves while developing a story collaboratively. This is achieved by the participants accessing each other’s utterances and 1) incorporating others’ utterances in their own speech (i.e., repetition and paraphrasing) or 2) supplementing or completing others’ utterances with their own words (i.e., co-construction). It is also shown that these linguistic resources often take place contiguously and synergistically to enhance the collaborative and bonding nature of casual Japanese conversation. Analysis suggests that, in animated informal conversations, Japanese speakers develop the conversations by spontaneously intertwining their utterances as if weaving strings into a braid. Developing this analogy, this study introduces a “braid structure” model to illustrate how in conversation, Japanese speakers, especially close friends, intricately connect their utterances, and by extension, themselves.

It has been pointed out that hee is one language resource through which news receipt may be indicated. In this paper, I focus on hee which is not used immediately after new information is conveyed, but rather is used once a series of sequentially organized linked sequences (“a sequence of sequences”, hereafter abbreviated as SoS) has reached a possible closing point. I attempt to reveal and clarify some of the interactional functions of hee in this particular position. Through the analysis, it was observed that hee was used: 1) after the SoS developed to deal with differences in epistemic stances that arose among conversation participants, and 2) after the SoS triggered after the news reported by the recipient reached a possible closing point. Moreover, in each of the above interactional environments, it was confirmed that the speaker used hee to explicitly close the SoS and advance the conversation. Hee is a resource by which participants can lead to the next sequence after explicitly closing a series of sequences. That is, hee can be used as a resource in the procedure of organizing multiple, related sequences.

Conveying the legitimacy of their visit is one of the basic tasks of a patient in a medical consultation. When a patient has already consulted another doctor, complaining about the previous doctor can be used as a resource for justifying the current visit. Making such a complaint is, however, a delicate and risky action because the target of the complaint is someone in the same profession as the doctor and this might elicit a negative assessment of the patient. This paper is a conversation analytic study about how patients handle this dilemma, focusing on the case of a patient with medically unexplained symptoms. It demonstrates that patients manage this dilemma by cautiously choosing when to make a complaint, how explicitly to do so, and whether to design their utterances as complaints or not. Such delicate balancing enables patients to present themselves as reasonable people and to enhance the legitimacy of their visit.

The purpose of this study is to examine the unique features of topic divisions identified by novices in conversational data analysis, what criteria they considered in identifying those topic divisions, and what teaching methods are most suited to novices. First, 40 Japanese undergraduate students watched a 10-minute video-clip of a Japanese-language conversation between two Japanese native speakers who were meeting for the first time. The 40 students were then asked to identify topic divisions and topic titles, and to describe the features of verbal/nonverbal devices which appeared in these topic divisions. Then, the authors calculated how often the students identified the same utterance as the place where a topic division should be made, and then examined the features of topic divisions which featured a high rate of consistency and those with a low rate of consistency. As a result, the authors found that although the rates of consistency of topic divisions were varied, the students did notice several verbal/nonverbal devices as hints to topic division. Lastly, we proposed a method for novices for considering criteria of topic division.