AAC Editors letter

I hope that you found the authors commentaries on their AAC papers in my last letter helpful.  It seems that authors are happy to provide these commentaries at the time they are informed that their papers will appear in the next issue of the journal.  I guess they are feeling particularly well disposed to requests from me at that time!  Youll maybe notice that there are slightly more articles in each issue of AAC than hitherto.  This is the result of a deliberate editorial policy to increase the range of articles in a given issue.  Please take a look at the commentaries for the March issue below Im sure youll find something there to interest you.

            Coming up in another issue this year will be a special issue on the state of the science in AAC, guest-edited by Jeff Higginbotham something to look forward to.  Looking further ahead, there will be a very special issue in September 2008 to celebrate ISAACs 25th birthday. The guest editors for that will be Janice Light and David McNaughton.  Thank you Jeff and Janice and David.  Any readers who are considering submitting a manuscript to AAC will be please to hear that we are succeeding in reducing the delays between submission and final decision and from acceptance to publication.  Keep the manuscripts coming!

 John Todman (Editor AAC)

  Long-term Outcomes for Individuals Who Use Augmentative and Alternative Communication: Part II Communicative Interaction

Shelley Lund and Janice Light

(USA)

For a long time we have known that conversations between individuals who   use AAC and those who use natural speech are not equal.  Speakingpartners dominate interactions they take up to twice as many turns and communicate more information per turn than individuals who use AAC.  Speaking partners also tend to control conversations, initiating most of the topics and asking many questions, forcing the individual who uses AAC into the role of answering question after question.   These patterns seem to hold true regardless of the age of the individual who uses AAC.  Even though studies have been conducted with participants of all ages, none have evaluated how interaction skills change over long periods of time. 

This study evaluated the interaction skills of seven young men (ages 19-23 years) who had used AAC systems since they were preschoolers.  For each participant, turn-taking patterns were evaluated by analyzing conversations with three partners: a caregiver, an unfamiliar partner, and a peer.  In addition to describing their current skills, the participants interaction patterns and communication skills were compared to when they were in preschool and participated in a previous study of interaction. 

The results of this study showed that the number of turns taken by the individuals who used AAC and their partners were more equal than when the participants were preschoolers.  Even though the individuals who used AAC were more equal participants in the conversation, the speaking partners still tended to dominate the interactions by asking many questions, especially those requiring a yes/no response.  Successful interactions are dependent upon the behaviors of both communication partners.  It is important that individuals who use AAC and their communication partners have the skills to be successful conversationalists.  To improve conversational patterns it may be necessary to teach both parties strategies to promote interaction.

         Analysis of Spelling Error Patterns of Individuals with

Complex Communication Needs and Physical Impairments

Pamela Hart, Julie Scherz, Kenn Apel and Barbara Hodson

(USA)

The efforts of the participants with complex communication needs and physical impairments who worked to complete the tasks for this study were immense. It was physically exhausting for these individuals to complete the tasks for this study, but more often than not, they wanted to continue working when I suggested taking breaks. For participant L.H., the physical struggle to spell letter by letter was particularly difficult.  At one point I asked L.H., "What do you think about spelling?" L.H. responded, "I like to spell."  This was after L.H. had been working to spell the same word for several minutes without success because of a difficulty with her head pointer.  It was at this point that I realized the significance of finding better access methods and assessment/intervention strategies for individuals with complex communication needs and physical impairments. This type of research is significant because these individuals need access to professionals who know how to help them acquire literacy skills. It became obvious to me while working with the individuals for this study, literacy skills translate to freedom.

The Effect of Aided AAC Modeling on the Expression of Multi-Symbol

Messages by Preschoolers Who Use AAC

Cathy Binger and Janice Light

(USA)

 The findings from this article on aided AAC modeling indicate that when communication partners use a childs aided AAC device to model linguistic targets, they are using a powerful technique to support the childs language development. The largely positive findings from this study should assist clinicians seeking to provide evidence-based practice for their young clients, as this study provides evidence that using aided AAC modeling can assist at least some children who use AAC to build their expressive language skills. The findings from this investigation also highlight the ability of some preschoolers who use AAC even those who have a degree of developmental delay to create multi-symbol messages. Four of the five preschoolers involved in this investigation consistently created diverse multi-symbol messages after relatively few instructional sessions, indicating that their prior lack of multi-symbol utterance productions was not due to internal factors (i.e., the childrens inherent abilities and/or disabilities) but to external factors, such as the need for aided AAC models. In other words, some children who use AAC may have much potential for rapid expressive language growth, given appropriate access to and instruction in AAC in addition to an expectation from their communication partners that they can achieve higher level language skills.

 The Effect of Color on the Recognition and Use of Line Drawings by Children With Severe Intellectual Disabilities

Jennifer Stephenson

(Australia)

As computer programs that produce line drawings for use in AAC became more sophisticated and were able to produce colored pictures, I observed that many teachers and speech pathologists automatically chose to use the colored drawings rather than black and white when producing pictures for students with severe intellectual disability with little or no comprehension or use of spoken language. Mostly they knew that colored photographs were easier for many of these students to learn to use. It seems the assumption was that color was a good thing and that colored line drawings were a better choice. However, it is color photos of specific objects that are easier to recognise, photos where the color of the depicted object matches the actual object referred to. It seemed to me that perhaps colored drawings where the color matched the color of the object referred to might be easier for these students to recognise and use and that line drawings where the color did not match might be more difficult than black and white drawings

The other aspect of picture recognition and use that I am interested in is how these students might learn to use pictures as symbols. One of the criteria of symbol use is the ability to link the symbol and the referent in a range of contexts and for both comprehension and production. Thus the set of assessment tasks I used was designed to assess picture recognition in a range of tasks to explore the impact of the task on line drawing recognition and use alongside the impact of line drawing type. A range of tasks including matching tasks and use of drawings for choice making were used.

  The AAC Mentor Project:

Web-based Instruction in Sociorelational Skills and Collaborative Problem Solving for Adults Who Use Augmentative and Alternative Communication

 Janice Light, David McNaughton, Carole Krezman, Michael Williams, Maija Gulens, Alix Galskoy, and Marleah Herman

(USA)

Adults who use AAC, who have successfully overcome barriers and achieved their goals, offer a potential rich source of problem solving strategies and encouragement for others with similar disabilities. They offer valuable perspectives and first hand experiences that cannot be provided by professionals, even those with many years of experience. Through mentoring relationships, adults who use AAC may teach others about positive outcomes and how these outcomes can be achieved. In this paper, we report on a leadership training program to prepare adults who use AAC in the sociorelational skills and problem solving skills required to be effective mentors of others who use AAC. The leadership training program was conducted over the Internet, allowing us to reach a wide range of individuals over a large geographic area. Through this program, we explored the viability of online instruction for individuals who require AAC. As a result of the online leadership training, the participants learned valuable skills and were better prepared to mentor others. They were ready to accept the challenge posed by Michael Williams (1996), a leading advocate for individuals who use AAC: As we master an area of our lives, it is important to go back and find someone else who would like to master the same thing. When you teach someone what you know, there are now two of you blazing the trail rather than you by yourself.

Brevity and Speed of Message Delivery Trade-offs in Augmentative and Alternative Communication

 Kathleen McCoy, Jan Bedrosian, Linda Hoag and Dallas Johnson

(USA)

Utterance-based AAC systems allow quick selection of full sentences that have been previously stored in the system. Technological development of these systems has concentrated on providing the means to quickly and easily retrieve these prestored messages, using various approaches in organizing the messages and in providing methods for their access. The advantage of using these quick messages could be reduced, however, if the messages do not exactly fit the situation.  Our study deals with that issue.  In this paper we are reporting on the findings of a third experiment in a series of four in which trade-offs faced by a user of an utterance-based system are studied. Here we look at whether the system user is viewed more favorably by observers if the user quickly delivers a prestored message that contains some repetition in words or phrases, or takes the time to edit out the repetitive information. We found that observers rated the system user significantly more favorably when they quickly delivered a prestored message even though it contained repetition, over the cases where the system user took the time to edit the message and then delivered a message with no repetition.

Research Priorities in Augmentative and Alternative Communication as Identified by People who use AAC and Their Facilitators

Natalie Kozak, Bernard. OKeefe and Reinhard Schuller.

(Canada)

Two focus groups comprised of adults who use AAC and two focus groups comprised of adult AAC facilitators in Ontario Canada were asked to identify their own AAC research priorities and to state their levels of agreement with previously identified research priorities in AAC. Members of the focus group who used AAC had physical disabilities since birth except one participant who became disabled at age two. Using focus group methodology and analysis, the participants were asked to generate their own AAC research priorities. A questionnaire and Likert-type scale was used to determine their levels of agreement with six research priorities set a decade earlier by a group of AAC researchers sponsored by the United States-based National Institute of Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). Aside from research themes that focus on technology and service delivery, the Focus group members emphasized preparing people who use AAC to succeed in situations such as maintaining friendships, dating, and finding jobs. The most important message offered to researchers by the participants who use AAC and the facilitators is the importance finding ways to apply appropriate communication and interaction behaviours to key life experiences. They want to see research that, for example, results in the development of intervention programs that lead to the acquisition of new life skills. One participant who uses AAC asked that clinicians and researchers "dont make the use of technology an end goal; instead show me how to communicate satisfactorily to get and keep a job".

The results of this research should also provide encouragement to all AAC researchers to include people who use AAC and those who communicate with them, whenever possible, in meaningful research roles.