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A tutorial: self-created film as a semiotic resource in AAC
Abstract
Sharing personal stories with others is essential to human interaction and language development. To communicate, individuals use a variety of semiotic resources, including images, symbols, and written and spoken language. These modes are deployed in the co-construction of a daily face-to-face conversation. A self-created film can serve as a valuable resource to facilitate a deeper understanding of a personal experience, especially where spoken or written language may present a challenge, for example, for people who rely on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Although the AAC literature indicates that using videos delivers benefits for aided communicators, guidelines on how to self-create, use, and transcribe them are rare. The present paper, a tutorial, describes how people who use AAC can develop a personal-video-scene (PVS) via the Film as Observable Communication (FaOC) method to utilize self-created films in sharing their stories. The first part of this paper, the theoretical framework, describes theories, methods, and practices from the fields of AAC, social semiotics, and visual anthropology, on which the FaOC method is based. The second part provides a step-by-step tutorial delivering practical guidance on how to create, use, and transcribe the PVS as a resource in conversations.
... Narrators/sign-makers who rely on AAC often demonstrate agency in finding creative resources, such as finger-/eye-pointing to an object in their environment or in an image from a past event [23,31]. By capturing, editing and using their own self-created films as a resource, named here a personal-video-scene (PVS), narrators with CCNs may exert more agency and control in their conversational narratives [18,19]. Conversational control can be reflected in the following: (1) the capacity to initiate or sustain a topic (topic development) (2) with verbal and nonverbal communicative expressions, creating comments and questions (conversational structure), which (3) must be understood by co-narrators to create common ground (conversational repair), a necessity for (4) maintaining a conversation (conversation maintenance) [32,33]. ...
... The focus is not on the resources as stand-alone communicative acts but how-in concert-these multimodalities influence the dynamics of an aided conversational narrative. Drawing on theories and methods from the fields of AAC, social semiotics and visual anthropology, a method called Film as Observable Communication (FaOC) was developed during the research project "My Film, My Story" [19]. The FaOC method is a practical multimodal literacy tool to assist children and adults with CCNs to create and use their own self-created films, PVSs, as a resource in their daily story-sharing, at school and at home. ...
... Recently, we described the theoretical background and the practical application of the FaOC method to create, use and transcribe self-created film media as a resource in daily story-sharing, in a tutorial paper (see [19]). The purpose of the current study is to examine in more detail how self-created film media, a PVS, produced though audiovisual technology by the aided narrators themselves can assist in social interactions, such as a multimodal conversational narrative. ...
When access to natural speech is limited or challenging, as is the case for people with complex communication needs, self-created digital film can be practical to use as one of the resources within a multimodal conversation about a personal experience. The detailed and contextual information such audiovisual media offers with today’s available technology may assist the utility of other communication modes, such as (computerized) spoken, written or signed language, to foster mutual understanding and story growth. To promote the use of self-created film, here named a personal-video-scene (PVS), in the practice of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), a greater understanding is required of how such media can operate as a resource within social interactions, such as daily conversations. This study therefore introduces a multimodal coding model developed to study the employment of a PVS within a film-elicited conversational narrative, relating to four aspects of conversational control: (a) topic development, (b) conversational structure, (c) conversational repair and (d) conversational maintenance. A case study illustrates how the use of a PVS in story-sharing was instrumental in establishing common ground between narrators, boosting the frequency of comments and questions, mitigating instances of conversational repair and expanding topic development.
Purpose
Listening to children using age-appropriate techniques supports evidence-based clinical decision-making. In this article, we test the Sound Effects Study Drawing Protocol, an arts-based technique, to support children with speech sound disorder (SSD) to express their views about talking.
Method
Participants were 124 Australian children aged 4–5 years in the Sound Effects Study. Their parents and teachers were concerned about their talking, and they were assessed as having SSD on the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology. Drawings and children's interpretations were elicited then analyzed using the (a) Who Am I? Draw-a-Person Scale and (b) Sound Effects Study Focal Points.
Results
Drawings were developmentally typical for 4- to 5-year-olds. The six Sound Effects Study Focal Points were identified across the 124 drawings: body parts and facial expressions, talking and listening, relationships and connection, positivity, negativity, and no talking. Participants portrayed talking and listening as an action requiring mouths and ears represented by symbols (letters, speech bubbles) or as an activity with a variety of people. Children typically portrayed themselves as happy when talking; however, some portrayed negativity and some chose not to draw talking.
Conclusions
In keeping with Articles 12 and 13 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, this research demonstrated that 4- to 5-year-old children with SSD can express their views about talking via drawing. Professionals may use the Sound Effects Study Drawing Protocol as a child-friendly technique to support children to express views to guide holistic, evidence-based, child-centered speech-language pathology practice.
This article takes as its starting point a recognition of play as meaning-making, and the playground as a rich and dynamic ‘meaning-makerspace’ where children draw moment-to-moment, rapidly and readily on the multiple resources available to them to make signs of their interest evident. These resources are drawn from their own lifeworlds, folkloric and site-specific imagination, transmitted game forms from the past, and their pleasure and affective response to contemporary media. The playground is, therefore, a dynamic site for making and re-making, reflecting the concept of ‘makerspace as mindset’, where creative, collaborative meaning-making occurs ceaselessly in a range of modes. To illustrate this position, we share findings from ‘Playing the Archive’, an ‘Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’ funded project exploring archives, spaces and technologies of play. Building upon the Iona and Peter Opie Archive of play from the 1950s–1960s, the project involved ethnographic research in two contemporary London primary school playgrounds, working with children aged 7–11 as co-researchers. A range of multimodal methods were used with the children to gain insights into their play, including iPads as filmmaking devices, chest-mounted GoPro cameras, voice recorders, drawings and mapping of playspaces. The research highlights that contemporary play exists not only in physical playgrounds, but increasingly in globalised ‘virtual playgrounds’ such as video games and social media. While these playworlds may at first appear separate, we identified ways in which virtual play intersects and inflects activity in the physical playground. We argue that play should therefore be seen as a series of ‘laminates’ drawing variously on media culture, folklore and the children’s everyday lived experiences, re-mixed and re-mediated inventively in the playground.
Drawn sequences of images are among our oldest records of human intelligence, appearing on cave paintings, wall carvings, and ancient pottery, and they pervade across cultures from instruction manuals to comics. They also appear prevalently as stimuli across Cognitive Science, for studies of temporal cognition, event structure, social cognition, discourse, and basic intelligence. Yet, despite this fundamental place in human expression and research on cognition, the study of visual narratives themselves has only recently gained traction in Cognitive Science. This work has suggested that visual narrative comprehension requires cultural exposure across a developmental trajectory and engages with domain‐general processing mechanisms shared by visual perception, attention, event cognition, and language, among others. Here, we review the relevance of such research for the broader Cognitive Science community, and make the case for why researchers should join the scholarship of this ubiquitous but understudied aspect of human expression.
Individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in later stages may rely on a variety of modalities to communicate. The current study used conversational analysis techniques to examine naturalistic face-to-face interaction between a man with late-stage ALS and his wife to understand the types of accommodations they made to ensure that successful meaning was established. Three extracts of talk were selected from a corpus of 30 videotaped interactions between a man with ALS interacting either with his wife or the first author of the study. The extracts were examined for the type of communicative resources used and the ways in which conversants worked together to maintain the temporal–sequential demands of in-person interaction. Conversants used a variety of communication modalities during their social interactions including voice, body, gestures, a speech-generating device (SGD), and the SGD screen to construct utterances for one another, establish meaning, and stay in-time. The pair were successful and maintained conversation expectations in many ways similar to those with nonimpaired voices and bodies. Conversations including an SGD are a highly coordinated and interactive affair that is experienced jointly by all conversants. In this study, the conversational partners were aware of, and sensitive to, the temporal–sequential demands of in-person interaction and the modality restrictions associated with SGD use. Clinical and device design recommendations are discussed.
Patient experience (PX) is getting attention among researchers and healthcare service providers, but little is known about the experiences of child patients and how to explore those. This paper reports findings from a study in which two participatory research methods, photo elicitation and video diary, were applied to investigate the elements of children’s PX in the context of children’s hospital. The aim was to find out what elements constitute the PX of children aged 7–16 years. The research data were gathered in 2016–2017. Twenty-two child patients participated in the study: eight children aged between 7 and 10 in the photo elicitation part, and fourteen children aged from 10 to 16 in the video diary part. In the analysis, the data were first analyzed per research method but afterwards combined and analyzed together. Based on the analysis, four main themes of PX of children were identified: 1) hospital facilities and entertainment, 2) medical care, 3) social relationships with the hospital personnel and other people, and 4) feelings and coping with the illness. Feedback on the research methods from the participated children was mainly positive. Further work is needed to validate the findings and introduce new creative approaches to research PX of children of different ages.
With the intention to comprehensively reflect the reality, foster interactions between researchers and participants, and empower the marginalized groups to be heard, videos are increasingly used in health studies. The findings of an action research project that integrates video-based methods into the development of dementia care in an aged care home in Hong Kong are reported. A working alliance consisted of practitioners, community-dwelling volunteers, service managers, university educators, and researchers was formed to develop a sustainable, need-based play program for the institutionalized elderly with dementia (EWD). Two innovative methods, namely, video elicitation focus group interview (VEFI) and participatory video (PV), were applied. Data analyses were collaboratively conducted by all practitioner-researchers during eight reflexive sessions. Several short films were made through PV for institutional training and community education. VEFI effectively enhanced the practitioners’ understanding of the embodied expressions of the EWD and provided a reflexive, democratic environment to generate knowledge among practitioner-researchers. Counter-narratives of the EWD and educational materials on dementia care were generated through PV. The study demonstrates how innovative video-based methods may enable participatory health research to be more inclusive, engaging, and empowering, and how these methods may provide new perspectives on the ethics of researching vulnerable populations.
Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) has been transformed by the social media revolution made possible by the emergence of mobile technology. The cumbersome dedicated devices of the 1970s have evolved into a burgeoning AAC app industry. However, the limited use and abandonment of AAC technologies remains high. Unlocking the untapped potential of technology requires a paradigm shift in the design of AAC technologies by building systems that minimize the cognitive load placed on users, adapting to their individual physical and language needs. Telling Tales shares insights and stories of how the combination of user‐centred design, interdisciplinary research and the application of intelligent computing is providing a vision of future generations of AAC technologies.
This article imagines a tussle between Multimodality, focused on ‘modes’, and Applied Linguistics (AL), based on ‘language’. A Social Semiotic approach to MM treats speech and writing as modes with distinct affordances, and, as all modes, treats them as ‘partial’ means of communication. The implications of partiality confound long-held assumptions of the sufficiency of ‘language’ for all communicational needs: an assumption shared by AL. Given MM’s plurality of modes and the diversity of audiences, design moves into focus, with a shift from competent performance to apt design. Principles of composition — e.g. linearity versus modularity — become crucial, raising the question at the heart of this paper: how do AL and MM deal with the shape of the contemporary semiotic landscape?
Occupational identity is an emerging construct in occupational science. To date, little research has been conducted that explores occupational identity in childhood, particularly with children with disabilities. This study undertakes research on this topic using a socio-cultural perspective. The research considers two main questions: “How is occupation implicated in the shaping of identity for children with disabilities?” and “How might a socio-cultural perspective reveal aspects of occupation and identity that are shaped by the dialectic between individual and social dimensions?” Using case study methodology, six children and their parents participated in assessment, photoelicitation interviews, and semi-structured interviews. Six core categories were identified across cases: a) Perceptions of self and other: Living with disability; b) Family identity, tradition and culture; c) Relational identity: A sense of belonging; d) Pride, success, and seeing things through; e) Growing up and keeping up; and f) Identity in the past, in the moment, and in the future. The findings reveal dimensions of identity and disability, identity as social, and identity as dynamic, which inform current conceptualizations about the relationship between occupation and identity for children with disabilities.
In this commentary, I consider variability as an ordinary and irremediable feature related to the indexicality not only of transcripts but first of all of transcribing. In this sense, it is not just a characteristic of transcripts as texts, which can be assessed in a kind of philological comparison comparing formal features of autonomous and fixed textual objects, but a characteristic of transcribing as a situated practice. Practices are irremediably indexical, reflexively tied to the context of their production and to the practical purposes of their accomplishment. Thus, a transcript is an evolving flexible object; it changes as the transcriber engages in listening and looking again at the tape, endlessly checking, revising, reformatting it. Transcribing relies in a fundamental way not only on the possibility of fixing the relevant details in a complex multilayered representation but also on the possibility of manipulating them, playing them again and again, at different paces, positions, fragments, while transcribing their finely tuned coordination, their synchronization, the fine articulation between different projections and sequential implicativenesses. These manipulations are one of the ways in which transcribing is accomplished as a situated practice.
As children have been increasingly conceptualized as active participants in their own social worlds, researchers have sought methods able to reveal children's perspectives as arbiters of their own experience. In an autodriven interview, photographs of the child's experiences serve as the basis for a child‐directed interview. Studies using this method illustrate its benefit for revealing child‐relevant content. In a study of childhood chronic illness, autodriving encouraged the child's free recall, sense of personal control, and ability to reflect upon photographed events.
The study of talk-in-interaction is focused on how people conduct social interactions in real world situations, in real-time. The purpose of this article is to provide a primer for understanding talk-in-interaction research, conversation analysis and microanalysis in the AAC field. An overview of talk-in-interaction research and a discussion of important issues in the field will be presented, followed by a tutorial on conducting microanalytic investigations in AAC. © 2013 International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication.
With the increasing use of video recording in social research methodological questions about multimodal transcription are more timely than ever before. How do researchers transcribe gesture, for instance, or gaze, and how can they show to readers of their transcripts how such modes operate in social interaction alongside speech? Should researchers bother transcribing these modes of communication at all? How do they define a ‘good’ transcript? In this paper we begin to develop a social semiotic framework to account for transcripts as artefacts, treating them as empirical material through which transcription as a social, meaning making practice can be reconstructed. We look at some multimodal transcripts produced in conversation analysis, discourse analysis, social semiotics and micro‐ethnography, drawing attention to the meaning‐making principles applied by the transcribers. We argue that there are significant representational differences between multimodal transcripts, reflecting differences in the professional practices and the rhetorical and analytical purposes of their makers.
Adult co-construction with children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) has been found to facilitate child communicative competence in general, but few studies have examined adult co-construction during the telling of personal narratives. This study explored the use of adult co-constructive strategies during personal storytelling with a child who used AAC. Case study discourse analysis methodology was utilized to analyze the types of co-construction strategies employed and the effectiveness of these co-construction strategies during an intervention session with a speech-language pathologist and a child who used AAC. The study concluded that use of child-centered co-construction strategies, including elicitation, question asking, prompts, positive praise, repetitions, and modeling of vocabulary and grammar, might be a facilitative factor in supporting the personal narratives of children who use AAC. Clinical implications for using child-centered co-construction during dyadic exchanges with children who use AAC are discussed.
A subset of children with Developmental Language Delay (DLD) encountered difficulties with the regulation of spoken discourse. In the conversations of caretakers with DLD children, several studies report difficulties with turn-taking, a proneness to use the non-verbal register, child and caretaker problems with topic management. Longitudinal research has yet to be conducted on the conversational behaviour of young DLD children and their caretakers.
The study investigates the development of style and structure of conversations between preschool-aged DLD children and their caretakers.
In a longitudinal design, language samples from twelve DLD children and six Normal Language-Acquiring (NLA) children and their caretakers were recorded in semi-structured play situations at two-month intervals across a period of 18 months. The children were between 2 and 3 years of age at the start of the study.
The data show that the DLD children predominantly use restricted linguistic forms, non-verbal register and experience difficulties with turn-taking, topic initiation and topic maintenance. The conversational style of the caretakers in dialogue with their DLD children consistently showed more attention-gathering turns, formulaic corrections, self-repetitions and re-introductions of topics when compared with the conversational style of caretakers in dialogue with their NLA children across the 18 months.
Caretakers in DLD dyads appear to develop a less facilitative conversational style and a decrease of contingencies in initiations and responses over time. The result is little opportunity for the conversational and linguistic skills of the DLD children to develop. Parental guidance in the form of conversational training, child-adjusted register, contingent response behaviour and the provision of language materials which can help the child discover his or her role as a conversational partner and recognize the different perspectives of conversational partners is emphasized.
A consensus transcription procedure is presented, and representative data are reported. The procedure includes explicit response definitions for mapping narrow phonetic transcription onto dichotomous, nonerror/error scores and 17 rules for obtaining consensus between two transcribers. The data include descriptive statistics for consensus rule use based on over 18,000 sounds transcribed during a normative study of speech sound acquisition in children aged 3–6 years. Validity and reliability issues in phonetic transcription are discussed.
Children’s engagement with transmedia narratives, where the same story is presented through different media such as book, film and interactive app, can reveal their knowledge about different modes, media and software for multimedia authoring. Such insights provide a suitable starting point for developing effective approaches to critical multimodal literacy education in the digital age. Specifically, they can inform decisions about which concepts and frameworks for the critical multimodal analysis of texts and digital technologies to adapt for use with young learners. We advance this argument through a case study comprising:
•the transmedia narrative The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore in its film (Joyce and Oldenburg, 2011), interactive app (Moonbot Studios, 2011), and traditional picture book (Joyce, 2012) formats;
•observations of mothers and their 4–5-year-old children’s interaction with the book and the app;
•a comic strip and a LEGO animation created respectively by a 7-year-old (Oskar) and a 10-year-old (Ollen), which represent a scene from that narrative; and.
•an interview with Ollen about his experience of making the animation with the software tools Stop Motion Studio and GarageBand ’08.
The case study’s findings reveal:
•preschool-aged children’s awareness of media affordances and semantic patterns in narrative.
•the older children’s understanding of narrative conventions and capacity to construe broad social themes by selecting the most apt semiotic resources available in their chosen media.
•the ways both familiarity with different digital semiotic technologies and non-digital resources (e.g. LEGO) and a software’s design can shape a child’s multimedia authoring.
Drawing on these findings, we argue that observations of children’s experiences with transmedia narratives provide a suitable starting point for developing effective approaches to critical multimodal literacy education in the digital age. We posit that such observations can help educators consider which concepts and frameworks for the critical multimodal analysis of texts and digital technologies to adapt for use with young learners in the classroom. This necessarily involves examining continuity and change across old and new technologies and semiotic practices.
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This paper explores the implications of children's out-of-school digital multimodal composing practices on learning and teaching in the formal educational context. It adopts a case study approach where publicly accessible YouTube video productions of three children around the world are examined. Applying a multimodal discourse analysis approach, we analyse the children's videos and discuss what they suggest about the children's literacies and skills. We argue that children's digital multimodal composing practices demonstrate their creativity, critical thinking, and a semiotic awareness. Following the case studies, we discuss how the educators can respond to students' out-of-school literacy activities by creating the 'third space' for learning in schools. ARTICLE HISTORY
Volunteer activities can provide opportunities to learn new skills, build social networks, and contribute to enhanced self-esteem. Volunteering also provides a positive contribution to society, and an opportunity to participate in activities that may differ from those in paid employment. People with severe disabilities and complex communication needs, however, may face significant barriers in participating and communicating in volunteer activities. A multiple-probe-across-participants, single-case experimental design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of videos with integrated visual scene displays (video VSDs). The video VSDs were presented using a tablet-based augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) app, as an intervention to increase the percent of steps completed independently within a volunteer activity. Participants were four adolescents with autism spectrum disorder or Down syndrome, all of whom had complex communication needs. Each participant met the mastery criterion for the activity – completion of the volunteer work activities and communication exchanges with co-volunteers – with the use of the video VSDs. The results provide preliminary evidence that video VSDs may be an effective assistive technology for individuals with severe disabilities and complex communication needs to increase participation in volunteer activities, both as an instructional support in learning new skills, and as an AAC technique to support interaction with others.
The contribution of cross-age peer e-mentoring on reported experiences of participation during online conversations using social media was explored in this pre-experimental study. Young people (n = 4, aged 13; 4–18;3 [years; months]) who used augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) participated in an e-mentoring intervention. Two mentors who also used AAC had regular conversations with the participants via Facebook¹1 Facebook is a social networking platform. www.facebook.com.View all notes, email, or Skype²2 Skype is a social networking platform. www.skype.comView all notes. It was predicted that the mentoring support would contribute to experiences of participation in online conversations outside of the e-mentoring intervention. Reported experiences of participation in online conversations with communication partners other than the mentor were measured at four time points. The Self-Reported Experiences of Activity Settings was used for this purpose because it consists of five domains: Personal Growth, Psychological Engagement, Social Belonging, Meaningful Interactions, and Choice and Control. These domains are associated with the construct of involvement in activity settings. Results showed varied scores between participants and across the domains. Reported experiences of choice and control increased slightly across time. Despite some variation in self-ratings, the participants reported experiencing choice and control, psychological engagement, and social belonging in online conversations. There is need for more research in this emerging area.
Young people who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) can experience reduced social participation and continue to face challenges in developing and using communication and literacy skills for real-life contexts. Drawing on emerging research, this discussion article highlights the potential benefits and advantages of participation in online conversations with peers as an additional support to both communication development and social participation for this group. Cross-Age peer e-mentoring to support participation in social media is proposed as a potential intervention strategy to enhance social participation and at the same time improve communicative competence and literacy for young people who use AAC.
Interactive digital technologies with facilities for developing conceptual frameworks and storing multidimensional data at different levels of description have the potential to advance research in semiotics (i.e., the study of sign systems and processes). Such an approach, called multimodal digital semiotics (O–Halloran et al., Text and Talk: Special Edition for Michael Halliday 33(4–5):665–690, 2013), involves a digital semiosphere (http://semioticon.com/semiotix/2011/02/multimodal-digital-semiotics/, http://semioticon.com/semiotix/2010/03/multimodal-semiosis-multimodal-semiotics-digital-technologies-and-techniques-for-studying-multimodal-communication/) for building theory and analytical approaches for semiotics research, borrowing from Lotman’s (Sign System Studies 33(1):208, 2005) notion of the semiosphere as the semiotic space, outside of which semiosis cannot exist. A digital semiosphere permits the interaction of sign systems in sociocultural processes to be theorized, analyzed, visualized, interpreted and compared, as demonstrated in this chapter. In this case, the underlying basis of the semiotics research is multimodal analytics, the study of semantic patterns arising from the integration of language, images, and audio resources in multimodal texts (O’Halloran et al., The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis, Routledge, London, p. 386, 2014). Multimodal digital semiotics, the digital semiosphere and multimodal analytics move digital humanities (e.g., Berry, Understanding digital humanities, Palgrave, Hampshire, 2012) into the realm of multimodal digital humanities; in this case. “leveraging the potential of the visual and aural media that are part of contemporary life” (Svensson, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 4(1), 2010; see also McPherson, Cinema Journal 48(2):119–123, 2009) for the development of theory, tools and techniques for semiotics research (O’Halloran et al., Visual communication, Gruyter, Berlin, pp.A 565–588, 2014; Podlasov and O–Halloran, Critical multimodal studies of popular culture, Routledge, New York, pp.A 71–90, 2014).
Some children fail to develop speech due to motor impairments, and have to use graphic symbols on communication aids to express themselves. Young aided communicators typically hear and produce different language forms. The adults’ child-directed language hence has a different form from the child’s utterances and their expansions of the child’s utterances tend to contain many linguistic elements that the children are unable to construct and produce. Reading and writing typically develop late in children who lack speech, and sometimes remain limited. The small graphic vocabulary of young aided communicators implies that they often have to rely on unusual and untaught ways of constructing meaning. The semiotics of their expressive communication appears to be a blend of the spoken language they hear, the graphic representations of the communication system they use, and the strategies they use to construct the expressions. Young aided communicators may show significant achievements, even when the language environment gives poor constructive support. This atypical form of language development may shed light on the children’s language situation and on language and semiotics in general.
Establishing reliability is an essential step in language sample transcription and analysis. This tutorial provides an illustration of replicable procedures for reliability testing during transcription and analysis of language samples generated by people who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems. Statistical measures used for testing agreement between raters coding categorical data are summarized. Detailed procedures for reliability testing in AAC language sample transcription and analysis are provided, beginning with the collection of raw language sample data. Procedures include guidelines for (a) establishing inter-judge agreement during the transcription process, and (b) using Cohen's kappa to establish inter-rater reliability during deeper analysis of transcribed utterances. All procedures are demonstrated in a case example using language samples from children who use AAC.
The study analyzed the communicative interaction patterns of eight congenitally nonspeaking physically disabled children (between the ages of 4 and 6 years) and their primary caregivers. The dyads were videotaped in a free play situation for 20 minutes. The videotaped interaction was transcribed in its entirety and coded with respect to three categories of variables: discourse status, communicative function, and mode of communication. The data were analyzed to reflect: the frequencies of the specific communicative behaviors of the children and the interrelationships of the three categories of variables within the children's turns. Findings revealed that the children used multiple modes to communicate: a mean of 81.8% of their communicative turns were conveyed by nonboard modes (e.g, vocalization, gesture, or eye gaze, used alone or in combination); 18.2% of their turns were conveyed by means of their communication boards. In general, the mode of communication was found to be strongly influenced by the discourse status and comcommunicative function of the turn. Provisions of information and clarification were accomplished municative primarily by means of the children's communication boards, while confirmations and denials were conveyed by means of vocalization or gesture. Directions for clinical intervention and for future research are discussed in light of the research findings.
One problem facing the field of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is inconsistent terminology. This may be due in part to the international and transdisciplinary nature of the field. Perhaps this inconsistency is most apparent when one considers the many terms that are used to describe iconicity. This paper discusses the various terms that have been used to describe this variable and proposes the adoption of a consistent terminology for iconicity. Further discussion is provided on other inconsistencies in terminology that have arisen in recent years.
This article discusses the photo-elicitation interview (PEI), a qualitative methodology, by addressing its fundamentals, providing examples of how to use it, and arguing its benefits and potential challenges. In PEIs, researchers introduce photographs into the interview context. The photographs used in PEIs can originate from the interviewee or the researcher. Researchers can use photographs as a tool to expand on questions and simultaneously, participants can use photographs to provide a unique way to communicate dimensions of their lives. Featured, in detail, are school ethnography and inner-city childhood studies that used PEIs.
This exploratory study describes the conversation patterns of three aided speakers and their communication partners and focuses on the question of whether patterns vary across different types of partners. The aided speakers were videotaped engaging in unstructured conversation with both a natural speaker and another aided speaker. Comparisons of conversation patterns were made across the two types of conversation dyads. The study explores several questions relating to conversational control, including (a) who introduces topics of conversation, (b) whether partners are equally likely to make conversational contributions, (c) whether summoning power is distributed equally, and (d) what proportion of the interactions are devoted to conversation repair, as opposed to topic development and other conversation maintenance functions. The findings suggest that patterns varied markedly across the two types of conversation dyads and that conversations between the aided speakers were noticeably more symmetric and less likely to require repair. Implications are discussed, as well as suggestions for future research.
This book investigates the forms and functions of storytelling in everyday conversation. It develops a rhetoric of everyday storytelling through an integrated approach to both the internal structure and the contextual integration of narrative passages. It aims at a more complete picture of oral narrative through analysis of a wider range of natural data, including personal anecdotes told for humor, put-down stories told for self-aggrandizement, family stories retold to ratify membership and so on, as well as marginal stories and narrative-like passages to delineate the boundaries of conversational storytelling and to test the analytical techniques proposed.
Using transcriptions of stories from everyday talk, Norrick explores disfluencies, formulaicity and repetition as teller strategies and listener cues alongside global phenomena such as retelling and narrative macrostructures. He also extends his analysis to narrative jokes from conversation and to narrative passages in drama, namely Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet” and Beckett’s “Endgame”.
This paper is a definition of photo elicitation and a history of its development in anthropology and sociology. The view of photo elicitation in these disciplines, where the greatest number of photo elicitation studies have taken place, organizes photo elicitation studies by topic and by form. The paper also presents practical considerations from a frequent photo elicitation researcher and concludes that photo elicitation enlarges the possibilities of conventional empirical research. In addition, the paper argues that photo elicitation also produces a different kind of information. Photo elicitation evokes information, feelings, and memories that are due to the photograph's particular form of representation.
This paper introduces semiotics to the field of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Semiotics includes the study of all types of communicative acts (signs) from language and other complex forms of human communication to animal communication and natural events in our environment. Its object of study overlaps that of AAC: communication. This paper presents semiotics as a methodological and/or theoretical framework that can be useful for AAC researchers and/or professionals to validate AAC terminology, identify sign characteristics, operationalize sign variables, expand sign taxonomies, and understand sign transmission processes (e.g., production and interpretation).
There is a need for a continuous discussion about what terms one should use within the field of augmentative and alternative communication. When talking and thinking about people in their role as users of alternative communication forms, the terms should reflect their communicative ways and means, their achievements and what they are doing, rather than focus on what they cannot do. There are rather few articles analyzing utterance construction and dialogue processes involving children and adults using manual and graphic communication systems. The aim of this paper was to contribute to reviving the discussion of terminology and to more analyses of signing and aided communication and an increase in the use of conversation excerpts in the AAC Journal and elsewhere.
The burgeoning role of technology in society has provided opportunities for the development of new means of communication for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). This paper offers an organizational framework for describing traditional and emerging augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technology, and highlights how tools within this framework can support a visual approach to everyday communication and improve language instruction. The growing adoption of handheld media devices along with applications acquired via a consumer-oriented delivery model suggests a potential paradigm shift in AAC for people with ASD.
Narrative abilities have been identified as a link to successful school achievement and, in particular, to the acquisition of literacy. Children who use AAC may be at risk of impaired narrative facility due to the differences in their language learning experiences, limitation of their AAC systems, and limitations from constrained access to physical and social environments. In this study, the elements of narrative that emerged in the interactions between an 8-year-old child who used an AAC device and her teacher are described. This assessment was achieved through use of the Narrative Assessment Profile (Bliss, McCabe, & Miranda, 20.
Miranda A. E., McCabe A., Bliss L. S. Jumping around and leaving things out. A profile of the narrative abilities of children with specific language impairments. Applied Psycholinguistics 1998; 19: 647–667View all references) in the context of five tasks designed to elicit a spectrum of narrative features. Results indicate that the interactions between the child and her teacher made it difficult to assess whether or not the child had control of certain features of narrative. From a purely structural analysis, most narrative discourse dimensions appeared to be severely compromised and therefore in need of immediate intervention. Discussion includes aspects of narrative intervention and suggested topics for further research.
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