“Don’t ask me those questions!”The co-construction of epistemic stance in the talk of

persons with dementia

Trini Stickle UW-MadisonJune 27, 2013

Introduction: The effects of dementia on displays of epistemic stance

Dementia: Disruptions in cognitive and memory capacity within everyday interactions • Awareness of disruptions to cognitive and memory (Plassman et al., 2007)

• Awareness that disruptions could have possible interactional consequence (Guendouzi & Müller, 2001)

Linguistic resources used to express states of knowledge or knowing• How we know what we know—evidentials (I see, I hear; I believe)

• How certain we know what we know—epistemics (I know, I guess; probably; It is Bob)

Sociality and the negotiation of epistemic positions in conversation Management of face with respect to differential knowledge levels (Goffman, 1957;

Brown & Levinson, 1978, 1987)

Management of differential epistemic positions among participants through turn design (Heritage & Raymond, 2005; Raymond & Heritage, 2006; Stivers, et al., 2010)

Impetus

Anecdotal observations Experiences with my mother and initial signs of vascular

dementia Unexpected usage of I know, I guess

Empirical observations from the Carolinas Conversation Collection Data: Audio recordings of conversations between elderly

participants with various health issues and student interviewers Epistemic downgrades

Overt displays of uncertainty or lack of knowledge in the talk of PwD

Examples: I don’t know, I think, I guess

Research questions and Methods employed

(1) Do PwD display different types and distribution patterns of epistemic markers compared with nonimpaired persons: matched cohort? Corpus studies?

(2) What interactional practices—sequences of talk and design of turns—contribute to the use of epistemic downgrades in the talk of persons with dementia;

(3) What are the consequences on local interactions or the sociability of PwD when faced with recurring moments of not knowing?

Method: Corpus studyA subset of the Carolinas Conversations Collection (CCC)Audio recordings of conversations between elderly participants and student interviewersTwo Cohorts: PwD and unimpaired persons; comparison with two corpus studies on epistemic stance in conversationsMethod: Conversation analysis and interactional linguisticsFocus on both the PwD and the nonimpaired coparticipant’s actions and turn designs (syntactic and prosodic) that result in epistemic downgrades—displays of not knowing

Method: Iterative CA and IL analysis of turns and actions that seem to reduce displays of epistemic downgrades and facilitate the progression of talk

On behalf of all the aging Badgers, I thank you for your work. And, I look forward to your questions and comments mine.

Trini Stickle