Signs of subjectivity in the speech of a psychotic child: a look upon hesitations

Abstract

This study, performed under a linguistic-discoursive prism, aimed to: (1) describe the moments in which occurred hesitations in the utterances of a psychotic child diagnosed with Language Disorder; and (2) determine the extent to which these moments (also) can indicate aspects of a subjectivity trying to emerge in this child. Data were extracted from a speech therapy session with a ten year old female child. Concerning the fi rst goal, from a total of 362 utterances produced by the child, only 74 (20%) had hesitation traces, while 288 (80%) did not. Concerning the second goal, the utterances with hesitation traces occurred in situations of: topic development, especially in the form of complementarity; introduction of new topic; return to the previous topic; refuses to the topic; enunciative incompleteness. The high percentage of utterances without hesitation traces (80%) is explained because they are highly predictable from the context, mostly in situations of ritualized adjacent pairs, oftentimes in situations of immediate specularity. The reduced percentage of utterances with hesitation traces are explained precisely by the fact that, unlike those without traces, in these ones, signs of a subjectivity that tries to emerge and show itself in the discourse production are detected. With the development of this study, we tried to emphasize the view at the hesitations as marks of subjectivity – in other words, evidences of confl icting relationships between the subject and the others that constitute the utter. The concern was also about bringing to the fi eld of Speech Pathology discoursive linguistic refl ections based on data extracted from symptomatic contexts of language.