NICOLE MÜLLER (ed.), Multilayered transcription. San Diego, CA: Plural Publishing, 2006. Pp. xi + 175. ISBN 1-59756-024-3 (original) (raw)

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 (CA), 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.