This volume, intended primarily for speech-language clinicians, is a valuable reference for researchers in various fields who want to encode more than ‘secretarial’ information about narratives and conversations, but who have had little or no training in doing so. Language and interaction researchers who use Conversation Analysis, such as Charles Goodwin and Marjorie Harness Goodwin, have shown that forcing transcription of speech into standard spelling and spacing, as if it were a script for a play, misses an enormous amount of information about the communication taking place. (If you doubt this, think about the months of interpretive work that must be undertaken by directors and actors to get a playwright's script off the page and onto the stage. Memorizing the script is not the hard part.)
The authors offer some persuasive examples of the clinical value of the kinds of information that can be encoded in parallel with an orthographic record, and basic information about how each of these kinds of coding can be carried out, from the phonetic to the discourse level, and beyond, to clinical analysis.
The book is presented as a ‘toolkit’ for annotating phonetic details, timing of responses, voice pitch variation, voice quality, variations in speech rate, self-corrections, interruptions, various types of gestures, and so on. The contributors pay careful attention to the essential fact that transcription choices should by driven by the intended analysis; over-transcription can be as self-defeating for the researcher as under-transcription. The approach is concrete and sensible, and the style appears to be accessible to a fairly wide range of readers. The contributors themselves are speech-language research clinicians – several of them very senior and well-known – who teach at major institutions and have published accordingly. Each chapter is followed by review questions that will be useful both for instructors and for those who are using the book on their own.
The first chapter, an overview entitled ‘What is transcription and why should we do it?’, by Nicole Müller, Jack Damico & Jacqueline Guendouzi, reminds readers of the ever-increasing importance of appropriate transcription in the clinic and other arenas, and emphasizes that relying on standard school-examination-like tests gives a very limited picture of a client's actual ability to communicate in real-world settings. The same is, of course, true for second-language learners and others who are far from being ideal speaker-hearers. This chapter also provides the terminology needed in the book, discusses how to choose and deploy audio and video recording equipment, and gives serious consideration to practical issues like page layout, the (large!) time commitment required for adequate accuracy, the problem of consistency, and the ethical responsibilities of the transcriber.
The second chapter, ‘Orthographic transcription’, by Guendouzi & Müller, discusses what is required at the orthographic level beyond the ‘secretarial’. They show the importance of attention to hesitations, false starts, interruptions, overlaps, voice quality, and errors – in other words, of faithfulness to what the speaker has actually said, including rendition of dialect forms and words not generally used in polite company. (Swear words may be a prominent part of what speakers say in some forms of aphasia, not just in Tourette's syndrome.) Faithfulness includes careful indication of the transcriber's uncertainty wherever speech is unclear, an important point that is foreign to many transcribers. The only allowed exception to fidelity is name substitution to protect confidentiality, and in order to show what the speakers can and cannot say (whether their pattern is consistent or variable), the authors recommend that substituted names should have the same phonological and prosodic patterns as the real name to the extent possible.
Chapter 3, ‘Transcribing at the segmental level’, by Martin Ball, explains clearly and succinctly the basics of articulatory phonetics, the inadequacies of standard English spelling for representing non-standard pronunciations, the International Phonetic Alphabet, and its importance in giving an accurate picture of disordered speech – this, of course, being what is encountered in most clients of a speech-language clinic. Narrow and broad levels of transcription are distinguished; the importance of using narrow transcription for key questions about a speaker's competence is nicely illustrated by an example in which a particular child entirely replaces the English voicing contrast by an aspiration contrast. While narrow transcription captures this, broad transcription collapses the child's [p, t, k] vs. [ph, th, kh] into an undifferentiated /p, t, k/ set. Extended IPA diacritics for disordered speech are discussed; computer-based tools for instrumental analysis of speech are mentioned briefly.
Chapter 4, ‘Transcribing at the suprasegmental level’, by Joan Rahilly, gives examples of ways in which timing, pitch, and other suprasegmental phenomena – notably those that contribute to the listener's perception of phrasal prominence – characterize certain types of abnormal speech. She exemplifies several notations for capturing these problems, adding that current systems are in need of elaboration and standardization in order to be really adequate for clinical needs.
Jack Damico & Nina Simmons-Mackie's chapter, ‘Transcribing gaze and gesture’, makes good use of many classics in interaction and Conversation Analysis, from seminal work by Kendon and by Goffman through recent work of the Goodwins and colleagues. After demonstrating the kinds of information that are missed by omitting gaze and gesture from a transcript of a conversation – for example, whether a person with aphasia wants help with a word search or not – the authors give basic guidelines for successful video recording.
In Müller & Guendouzi's ‘Transcribing at the discourse level’, two notational approaches are presented and exemplified in parallel throughout the chapter: Conversation Analysis and Speech Act analysis (or Illocutionary Act analysis). The latter has been used in the clinic for some time, and the authors indicate clearly some of the problems involved in categorizing speech acts, as well as the need for creating new categories that relate to information management. They also note that ‘analytic doubt’ about the category to which an utterance belongs tends to arise when the speaker attempts to elaborate utterances or to shift topics – an observation of potential value in itself.
The final level of transcription in this text, one not usually considered by linguists, is described by John Tetnowski & Thomas Franklin as ‘The clinical analysis level’. They describe the process of error analysis, using many of the transcription levels presented in chapters 2–6. They first apply their approach to stuttering, showing how it can be differentiated from non-pathological non-fluencies. They argue convincingly that this kind of documentable distinction is necessary if one is to conclude that a particular type of therapy has been effective. They continue with illustrations from several other pathologies, showing how each level of transcription can be used to characterize disorders.
Chapter 8, ‘Assembling and extending the toolkit’, by Müller & Ball, pulls the book together, illustrating multi-layered transcription for several cases, and also giving an example of stuttering in Welsh and how it can be rendered using an interlinear translation. However, the principles of interlinear translation are not given, nor is any reference from which one might learn them, e.g. Lehmann Reference Lehmann1982. A final example shows how a single transcript can incorporate both signed and spoken language.
Linguists who have been involved in fieldwork – especially those whose stance has been formed by the last several decades of work in Conversation Analysis – will find most of the contents familiar with respect to methodology, but the book's clinical illustrations will provide interesting glimpses into various language disorders, an area of applied linguistics that is rarely represented in the linguistics curriculum. Clinicians who are familiar only with orthographic and perhaps phonetic transcription will find the materials on higher levels of transcription an intriguing introduction. However, because the book has been kept short (and affordable), readers who wish to actually learn the art of transcribing suprasegmental, discourse, and interactive non-verbal patterns will need to go beyond what is provided. The examples as presented are certainly appropriate in length and variety as illustrations for a printed text, but not nearly long enough to show how to deal with many problems that can come up. Indeed, skills in transcription are impossible to learn without audiotapes; transcribing gaze and gesture and doing Conversation Analysis are impossible to learn without videos. I hope that a second edition of this book can be issued with a video CD containing substantial sections of clinical conversations paired with transcriptions at the various levels, so that the book plus the disk can become a stand-alone self-teaching tool for clinicians who do not have the time to attend courses on the transcription levels that they consider relevant to the needs of their clients.
The book as it stands could be used to good effect in the classroom by instructors who are already familiar with the types of transcription described if they are able to supplement the text with appropriate audio and video materials from their own or shared clinical sources. However, without such additional resources, it would be inappropriate for the classroom.
The other major problem with this otherwise quite admirable effort is that the editors and contributors have not linked it to the major archiving source for non-ideal speaker-hearers, the web-accessible Child Language Data Exchange (CHILDES), based at Carnegie Mellon and Harvard Universities, or indeed even mentioned its existence. CHILDES is already multilayered. It has its own conventions – some very good, some still problematic – for all of these levels of transcription, and its methodology is currently being expanded to AphasiaBank, a video archive with linked transcriptions. Multilayered transcription is up-to-date in its theoretical stances towards its various layers, but it seems to inhabit a pencil-and-paper/ink-and-print technology world that is already disappearing. The next edition, in addition to having the suggested CD, needs to take into account the fact that students and researchers expect to create materials on a computer, and to be able to use data bases relevant to their work. The book needs to add sections linking its notation to the ones used in CHILDES. It also needs to address squarely the question of which aspects of speech and language can be easily represented in the electronic medium, which aspects require some extra work (e.g. getting access to a UNICODE IPA font which will be stable across computers and printers), and which aspects are quite difficult (e.g. choosing an intuitively readable pitch contour transcription). It also needs to dwell more on the uses of easily available speech analysis software such as PRAAT.
In summary, this book is unique and valuable in what it attempts and accomplishes, but it begs for an expanded second edition if it is to realize its goal of bringing multilayered transcription into classroom and clinical practice.
