Communicative interaction with aphasia is challenging for both the aphasic and the non-aphasic participant of a conversation. Aphasia is a language disorder associated with acquired brain injury. People with aphasia have a limited ability to express themselves linguistically and non-aphasic conversational partners may find it hard to appreciate their reduced or unspecific utterances.
This study explores the hypothesis that communication problems in conversations with aphasia may in part occur because the aphasic and the non-aphasic participant have diverging expectations of the scope of the discourse in terms of its contextual, textual and linguistic properties. Therefore, the communicative potential of already limited verbal expressions may not be recognized. A qualitative analysis of verbal actions in three separate interactive events traces back the expectations of individual aphasic and non-aphasic participants concerning the genre of discourse they think they are engaged in.
