ABSTRACT
In describing the tenor of their interactions, people who rely on means other than mouth-speech for face-to-face communication commonly bring up issues of time and timing. Sometimes the issues relate to how long it takes to get one’s body to make all the movements needed to produce a coherent message. Sometimes it is an issue of how good certain interlocutors are in getting into synch with the speaker. Sometimes these issues concern interlocutors not having enough time or patience. Sometimes the issue is one of personal time management and how much time one can afford to spend in face-to-face interaction. Sometimes the issue concerns how and why different means and devices for communication are selected to meet the temporal demands of different contexts. And sometimes there’s an issue surrounding normative understandings of the temporal flow of communication and how this can rob some individuals of the ability to say exactly what they want to say when they need to say it. Such concerns bring into sharp relief the fact that there is a significant number of distinct temporal threads that need to be jointly coordinated by all participants for each of them to feel that the interaction was not just a successful one but also a good one. If the joint communicative interaction is seen by one or the other party as a failure due to a temporal coordination problem, then there can be recriminations of communication incompetence that get launched in each direction. The primary aim of this chapter is to examine some of the distinct temporal threads that are attended to in the communicative interactions of individuals using alternative and augmentative means of communication, and to show how success or failure to meet in the same timestream can result in social evaluations of “competence” or “incompetence” in communication.
