A Review of RAY WILKINSON, JOHN P. RAE, GITTE RASMUSSEN (eds.), ATYPICAL INTERACTION: THE IMPACT OF COMMUNICATIVE IMPAIRMENTS WITHIN EVERYDAY TALK. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, XXIII+470 pp.

The collection of articles under review includes conversation analytic studies of interactions involving the participation of at least one person with communicative impairments (aphasia, dementia, dysarthria, etc.). The authors concentrate on how these impairments influence interaction—the organization of repair in particular—as well as on issues of participants’ adaption to impairments, collaboration, the agency of people with impairments, and practices of face maintenance. Three more general issues connected to this field of study are discussed in the review. The first issue is a choice of analytic categories and the application of the category of repair. This category seems justified since participants frequently have to clarify the meaning of their partners’ actions. However, this choice may appear problematic if one does not take into account that interactions with people with impairments have their own progressivity, which differs from the progressivity of ordinary conversation. The second issue is the role of nonverbal actions, which is crucial in circumstances where some of the participants lack verbal resources. The third issue concerns the problem of the understanding which participants try to achieve in the course of interaction and which researchers try to achieve in the course of analysis. This task becomes more challenging in comparison to ordinary conversations. On the one hand, actions of persons with impairments are sometimes ambiguous and require special interpretative efforts from their partners. On the other hand, there is always a risk that the partner will interpret actions of impaired person inadequately.