Enabling the person with aphasia to speak: the role of the speech-therapist’s bodily and sensorial resources

In this presentation, I focus on a specific type of disability, that is a language and communicative impairment such as post-stroke aphasia, and on the interactive dimension of its recovery, as it takes place in speech-language therapy sessions. Since aphasia can result in difficulties in language production, therapeutic tasks are devoted to exercise words retrieval and to target lexical and phonological difficulties. Analyzing the interactive and sequential organization of these tasks, I show the role played by the therapist’s body in scaffolding the patient’s productions, as (s)he mobilizes different bodily and sensorial resources, such as prosodic means, specific gestures, facial expressions, touch. I will present a collection of cases which will allow me to discuss 1) the role played by the therapist in enabling and “assisting” the patient to speak; 2) the specificities of bodily practices within a therapeutic setting in which speech production is performed as an embodied, multimodal and multisensorial experience.