Clinician-child discourse: some preliminary questions.

Various pragmatic procedures were used to analyze clinician-child discourse in a language remediation setting. Communicative acts, responses to prior requests, and discourse topics were described in the interaction between clinician and child. Three major trends were derived from the data. First, consistent patterns were found among clinicians and children for the relative frequency of communicative acts as well as the general and specific types of communicative acts. Second, patterns were not found for the responses to prior requests for either clinicians or children. Last, consistent patterns were found across data on groups of clinicians and children for the introduction, continuation, and reintroduction of discourse topics. Preliminary questions are raised regarding the variables associated with clinician-child discourse to begin to understand the nature of this interaction.