A Linguistic Analysis of Three People with No Prior AAC Experience Using an AAC Device

Collier, Joe and Dietz, Aimee Rebekah and Griffith, Julie (2014) A Linguistic Analysis of Three People with No Prior AAC Experience Using an AAC Device. [Clinical Aphasiology Paper]

PDF 566-1104-1-RV(Collier-Dietz-Griffith).pdf Download (111kB)

Abstract

Since approximately 50% of people with aphasia experience incomplete restoration of language, augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for people with aphasia has been used primarily as a compensatory therapeutic intervention. AAC is less frequently considered to restore linguistic functions (Weissling & Prentice 2010). Recently, researchers described the communication patterns used by people with aphasia when they retold personal narratives using four different AAC screen layouts (Dietz, Griffith, & Macke, 2014; Dietz, Weissling, Griffith, & McKelvey, 2014; Griffith, Dietz, & Weissling, 2014). Across these reports, the people with aphasia employed a variety of expressive modality units (i.e., spoken, written, drawn, picture, text box, and speak button) to retell their stories; however, they predominately used the spoken modality to retell each story. Despite the presence of an AAC device, they spoke, on average 70% of the time across all retells, (Dietz et al, 2014a; 2014b; Griffith et al., 2014). The question remains, though, whether these high levels of spoken output translates in to more effective and efficient verbal expression. Therefore, as such, the purpose of this retrospective case series study was to describe and analyze the spoken linguistic output of the people with aphasia and no prior AAC experience from the Dietz et al., (2014a; 2014b) studies.

Actions (login required)

View Item