Minna Laakso

• PhD
• Professor at University of Helsinki

Pointing plays a significant role in communication and language development. However, in spoken languages pointing has been viewed as a non-verbal gesture, whereas in sign languages, pointing is regarded to represent a linguistic unit of language. This study compared the use of pointing between seven bilingual hearing children of deaf parents (Kids...

In this scoping review on 34 studies, we examined the use of immersive virtual reality (IVR) in neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD). IVR was mostly used in connection with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) for assessment of and intervention in social skills, and in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) for assessment of executive performance....

Objective To study patient-reported hearing aid (HA) rehabilitation outcomes, social-communicative functioning, and expectations/experiences during eight months of HA use. Design Three self-reporting instruments, the International Outcome Inventory for Hearing Aids (IOI-HA), the Quantified Denver Scale of Communicative Function (QDS), and question...

This paper analyses disfluencies and ungrammatical expressions in the speech of 11-13-year-old Finnish-speaking boys with ASD (N = 5) and with neurotypical development (N = 6). The ASD data were from authentic group therapy sessions and neurotypical data from teacher-led group discussions. The proportion of disfluencies and ungrammatical expression...

This study examines repair organization in linguistically asymmetric interactions which involve participants with limited competencies in producing language.

This study explores the use of other-initiations of repair by children with developmental language disorder (DLD). The data are children’s video-recorded language assessment sessions, speech-language therapy sessions and two kinds of non-institutional play sessions, parent–child and peer play. The videotapes were transcribed following CA convention...

Hearing impairment is a common chronic condition in middle-aged and elderly adults. The number of individuals with hearing impairment is expected to rise because of the longer life expectancies and trends in the population growth. Acquired hearing impairment in adulthood is not just a disorder of the sense of hearing. It is primarily a social disab...

Purpose: Research on stigma has been criticized for centering on the perceptions of individuals and their effect on social interactions rather than studying stigma as a dynamic and relational phenomenon as originally defined by Goffman. This review investigates whether and how stigma has been evaluated as a social process in the context of hearing...

The quality of interaction between hearing health professionals and patients is one prominent, yet under-studied explanation for the low adherence in acquiring and using a hearing aid. This study describes two different ways of introducing hearing aid to the patients at their first visits at the hearing clinic: an inquiry asking patients opinion fo...

Background To manage conversational breakdowns, individuals with hearing loss (HL) often have to request their interlocutors to repeat or clarify. Aims To examine how middle‐aged hearing aid (HA) users manage conversational breakdowns by using open‐class repair initiations (e.g., questions such as sorry, what and huh), and whether their use of rep...

This study describes the role of ungrammatical utterances and disfluent speech in the creation of comprehension problems between the participants in group therapy sessions of preadolescents with autism. The speech of the autistic preadolescents included frequent disfluencies and morpho-syntactic problems, such as wrong case endings, ambiguous prono...

Puheäänen korkeuteen (F0) vaikuttavat anatomisten ja biologisten tekijöiden lisäksi erilaiset sosiokulttuuriset ja behavioraaliset käyttäytymismallit. Äänenkäytön kannalta epäoptimaaliset mallit voivat johtaa jopa äänihäiriöihin. Tutkimus selvitti, mikä on suomea äidinkielenään puhuvien 16–17-vuotiaiden nuorten puheäänen korkeus ääneen luettaessa j...

In this study we explore patterns of same-turn self-repair within the word, across ten typologically and areally diverse languages. We find universal processes emerging through language-specific resources, namely: recycling is used to delay a next item due, while replacement is used to replace an inappropriate item. For example, most of our languag...

Arvioitu teos: Laura Kanto: Two languages, two modalities. A special type of early bilingual language acquisition in hearing children of Deaf parents. Acta Universitatis Ouluensis B 141. Oulu: Oulun yliopisto 2016. Johdanto 126 s. ja kolme artikkelia. isbn 978-952-62-1177-0 (pdf).

This study examines lexical intervention sessions in speech and language therapy for children with cochlear implants (CIs). Particular focus is on the therapist’s professional practices in doing the therapy. The participants in this study are three congenitally deaf children with CIs together with their speech and language therapist. The video reco...

The present study compares the ways in which conversational partners manage expressive linguistic problems produced by participants with fluent vs. non-fluent aphasia. Both everyday conversations with family members and institutional conversations with speech-language therapists were examined. The data consisted of 110 conversational sequences in w...

When a person discovers they have a hearing problem and acquire an HA, they start negotiating their relationship with hard-of-hearing/hearing and disabled/non-disabled employee groups. This negotiation is context-bound, situational and non-linear as a process, as these group memberships are not equally valued (see Fig. 2). Employers lack knowledge...

We describe how hard-of-hearing (HOH) employees renegotiate both their existing and new group memberships when they acquire and begin to use hearing aids (HAs). Our research setting was longitudinal and we carried out a theory-informed qualitative analysis of multiple qualitative data. When an individual discovers that they have a hearing problem a...

How do people with aphasia express their emotions? This article uses a sample of video-recorded speech and language therapy sessions to see how patients make use of facial, vocal, and bodily expression. Analysis shows that their affect displays regularly co-occur with linguistic difficulties and efforts to repair them. The most common affect displa...

This article examines the professional practices of a speech and language therapist in multiparty interaction with children with cochlear implants and their parents. The study aims to provide a more detailed picture of multiparty therapy interaction and to describe shifts in participation during the therapy process. The speech and language therapy...

Background: Searching for words is a common phenomenon in conversations of people with aphasia. When searching for a word the speaker interrupts the emerging conversational turn with a pause, vocalisation (e.g., uh), and/or a question (e.g., what is it). Previous studies suggest that gazing and pointing can be used to invite conversational partners...

Repair initiated by parents provides their children with corrective feedback of the children’s developing talk.To investigate how the interactive repair process is constructed, this study looked at five mother—child pairs during play interaction, focusing on mother-initiated repair sequences (N = 163). The mothers used many types of repair initiato...

This article examines the ways of initiating self-repair in the ongoing turn-constructional unit in conversation. The data come from a wide variety of interactions in Finnish, comprising some 600 instances. In the data, speakers use both non-lexical and lexical devices for marking that they have initiated a self-repair. The initiators focused on ar...

Pretend play is an achievement in which children ‘talk and act’ the pretense into being. In order to do this, constant negotiations on the details of the play take place. This study describes how five-year-old girls propose and negotiate the ongoing play activity using the Finnish agreement pursuing question particle jooko. The data come from The H...

This article discusses a communicative phenomenon that is relatively less studied: getting stuck in an aphasic conversation. Although aphasia as a medical and linguistic condition has been widely examined, the more social and participatory aspects of the symptom are not so well-known. Aphasia forms a threat to the emergence of a shared understandin...

Same-turn self-repair is the process by which speakers stop an utterance in progress and then abort, recast or redo that utterance. While same-turn self-repair has become a topic of great interest in the past decade, very little has been written on the question of where within a word speakers tend to initiate repair (the main exceptions being Scheg...

The aim of this study was to examine what four-year-old children repair in their speech. For this purpose, conversational self-repairs (N=316) made by two typically developing Finnish-speaking children (aged 4 ; 8 and 4 ; 11) were examined. The data comprised eight hours of natural interactions videotaped at the children's homes. The tapes were ana...

This is the introductory chapter to the volume "Talk-in-Interaction: Comparative Dimensions". It reflects on implicit and explicit comparative perspectives that have been present i conversation analytic and interactional linguistic research. The main points include comparison across types of interaction, comparison across participants with differen...

Current diagnostic taxonomies (ICD-10, DSM-IV) emphasize normal acquisition of language in Asperger syndrome (AS). Although many linguistic sub-skills may be fairly normal in AS there are also contradictory findings. There are only few studies examining language skills of children with AS in detail. The aim of this study was to study language perfo...

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How do people with brain damage communicate? How does the partial or total loss of the ability to speak and use language fluently manifest itself in actual conversation? How are people with brain damage able to expand their cognitive ability through interaction with others - and how do these discursive activities in turn influence cognition? This g...

Background: We present a multiple-baseline single-case treatment study on anomia. The present anomia treatment technique originates from several studies whose aim was to test word-production models in a multiple object naming paradigm by eliciting naming responses in normal (Martin, Weisberg, & Saffran, 1989) and aphasic speakers (Laine & Martin, 1...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the linguistic problems of aphasic speakers of Finnish. The focus is on Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia. First, we present an overview of the special characteristics of the grammar of Finnish. Secondly, there is a discussion of previous studies on aphasic speakers of Finnish. Thirdly, we present an analysis of...

The focus of this article is to examine in more detail the collaborative nature of aphasic conversation. In particular, collaborative efforts can be seen in such situations where aphasic problems, such as word searching, emerge. These problems have traditionally been studied as a cognitive process of an aphasic individual. The aim is to demonstrate...

We examined the coherence and informativeness of discourse in vascular dementia (VaD) and probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) by analyzing work history interviews in 8 patients with VaD, 11 patients with AD, and 19 age- and education-matched normal controls. The patient groups had comparable levels of cognitive impairment (mild-to-moderate dementia)....

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