Speech therapy with a group of hearing impaired adolescents II: mutual nonverbal involvement in therapy sessions

Abstract

Speech therapy conversations between five dyads, consisting of senior speech pathology students and hearing-impaired adolescents enrolled in a Total Communication programme, were videorecorded for five weekly sessions. Samples over one-minute intervals at the start, middle, and end of the sessions were analysed for nonverbal behaviour at 3-second periods on 5-point scales covering body orientation, body position, eye gaze, facial expression, head position, and gesture/hand movement. Combination of the six resulting scores produced composite scores, which analysis of variance showed to differ significantly between dyads, sessions, intervals, and conversation partners (students versus adolescents). There were also significant interactions between dyads X sessions, dyads X partners, and sessions X partners. Examples using simple time series analysis complemented the analysis of variance by describing evidence for cyclical involvement between conversation partners.