Marja-Liissa Helasvuo,
Minna Laakso, &
Marja-Leena Sorjonen
Searching for Words: Syntactic and Sequential Construction of Word Search in Conversations of Finnish Speakers with Aphasia
Marja-Liisa Helasvuo received her MA in Finnish language at the University of Helsinki, and her PhD in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is currently working as a Research Fellow at the department of Finnish and general linguistics at the University of Turku. Her research focuses on the interplay between grammar and interaction. She is the author of Syntax in the Making (Benjamins, 2001), and the editor of Virittäjä, Journal of the Society for the Study of Finnish. For current projects and publications, see http://users.utu.fi/mlhelas/mlheng.html
Minna Laakso, Ph.D, is a University Lecturer in logopedics (speech and language pathology) at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests are in the organization of repair in ordinary and institutional conversation. For the past fifteen years, she has studied videotaped interactions of people with aphasia. She received her Ph.D in 1997, and is the author of Self-Initiated Repair by Fluent Aphasic Speakers in Conversation (published by Finnish Literature Society). Currently she is studying the emergence and development of repair practices in preschool-aged children's conversation. Her project "Child's developing interaction" started in the beginning of the year 2004 and is funded by the Academy of Finland and Emil Aaltonen Foundation.
Marja-Leena Sorjonen received her MA in Finnish language at the University of Helsinki and her Ph.D in applied linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is working as a Senior Researcher at the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland, Helsinki, where she is in charge of the unit of research on spoken Finnish. Her research interests are in the areas of interaction and grammar, institutional interaction and linguistic variation. Her current projects include a project on interactional practices in service encounters, and she is also involved in a European project "Language as social action: A comparative study of affiliation and disaffiliation across national communities and institutional settings", coordinated by Anna Lindström, University of Uppsala, Sweden.
The study on word search presented in this article was done as a part of the project "The management of problems of speaking in ordinary conversations of aphasic speakers" also funded by the Academy of Finland.
