As stated in the preface, Multi-layered Transcription is mainly intended for students, practitioners, and researchers in the areas of speech-language pathology, clinical phonetics and linguistics. In fact, the volume can be useful for everyone who intends to transcribe and describe different speech events (even in cases of multilingual communication).
Each of the book's eight chapters provides a number of useful step-by-step, well-analyzed examples of detailed transcription, tables and drawings that make the reading process much easier. The book can be divided into three topical sections, comprised of articles relating to the transcription of verbal (chapters 2–4) and nonverbal (chapter 5) aspects of human interaction, as well as general principles and recommendations for the transcription of spoken text (chapters 1, 6–8).
Nicole Müller, Jack Damico and Jackie Guendouzi try to answer the difficult question ‘What is transcription and why should a researcher deal with it?’ This part will be especially interesting for discourse analysts and phoneticians. In this context, the term transcribing refers to the process of transferring or translating speech, spoken language, and nonverbal aspects of human interaction. It is obvious that the transcript is the product resulting from this process. transcription covers both process and product. For beginning transcribers, the authors make some recommendations concerning transcription practices.
The next few chapters of the book are dedicated to the different aspects of transcribing. Guendouzi & Müller's chapter offers advice on orthographic transcription. According to the authors, simply ‘writing the words down’ (37) does not provide sufficient detail for a satisfactory analysis of spoken language. Emphasizing the difference between the transcriber's and the participant's perspective on intelligibility, and the importance of keeping a record of silence, overlaps, and interruptions in the transcript and of a speaker's dialect, they suggest conventions for enriched orthographic transcription, either in a single-layer transcript or as the baseline and anchor-point of a multi-layered effort.
Martin Ball concentrates on transcribing at the segmental level, explaining why ordinary orthography is not adequate in the transcription of recorded speech under clinical conditions. Speech pathologists and phoneticians should prefer phonetic transcription to record the pronunciation patterns of their speech clients. He shows how the transcription of individual consonants and vowels can take place under the heading of segmental information. For readers who are unfamiliar with the field of phonetics, he includes helpful references.
Joan Rahilly gives detailed guidelines for transcribing at the suprasegmental level. Reviewing the contributions of the American and British analysts to the field of suprasegmentals, she outlines a suitable model for transcribing suprasegmental aspects of speech in the clinical context. Adapting the transcriptional method ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) to suprasegmental analysis in clinical speech contexts, she focuses more on the needs of clinicians than novices of the field.
Jack Damico & Nina Simmons-Mackie deal with transcribing gaze and gesture, which can have a significant impact on the interpretation of talk-as-social-action. Genuine communication is a complex process, involving the direction of gaze and the type and scope of gestures. By creating a gaze/gestural line, the researcher becomes more aware of communication as a multi-layered process and can see far beyond the verbal utterances.
Müller & Guendouzi discuss transcribing at the discourse level. Giving different definitions of discourse from studies carried out on conversational analysis and discussing discourse as both process and product, they apply methods and theories developed in nonclinical contexts to research on communication disorders, pointing out shortcomings where necessary. For students of speech therapy, the theoretical background of this and the previous chapter can be somewhat difficult. These are more accessible to advanced-level students if they have already had courses in general linguistics, psychology or sociology.
John Tetnowski & Thomas Franklin scrutinize the clinical analysis level. Focusing on patients with multiple communication differences and disorders, the authors demonstrate advantages and disadvantages of including a clinical layer of transcription. They show how a multi-layered transcription approach can lead to more efficacious and efficient intervention for communicatively impaired clients.
Reconsidering some of the issues highlighted above, the final chapter by Müller & Ball assembles and extends the tool kit. The authors illustrate how different layers of a multi-layered transcription can be combined and how the tool kit can be expanded if needed. They also discuss three closely-related motivations for transcribing speech: transcribing is seen here as analysis, documentation and learning.
The book ends with the appendix and author and subject indices. In the appendix, the reader can find all transcribing conventions needed for a multi-layered transcript, from the very basic layouts to voice-quality symbols and the meta-layers.
By providing numerous useful and multifaceted references, dividing the main text into small and reader-friendly paragraphs, and posing a list of consolidating review questions after each chapter, Müller et al. have achieved their initial aim – to help students and practitioners who deal with communication disorders. This highly recommendable book will be appreciated not only by the experienced linguist interested in the theoretical and practical issues underlying transcription, but by any ambitious student of clinical phonetics and linguistics as well.
