Linguistic and temporal resources of pre-stored utterances in everyday conversations

Abstract

Aided communicators often have an opportunity to express themselves with speech-generating devices (SGDs) that produce symbol by symbol (SBS) and/or pre-stored (PS) utterances. Studies on the usage of PS utterances report that these utterances affect conversations positively, but it appears that aided communicators and professionals may have divergent views on their benefits. The aim of this study is to analyse how school-aged aided communicators, their mothers, peers, and speech and language therapists (SLTs) co-construct the social actions of PS utterances during their everyday interactions. The theoretical framework of this study is conversation analysis. This approach to analysing the data enhances our understanding of the linguistic and temporal resources of PS utterances and how they are used to reinforce various rich social actions that promote the progress of aided conversations to resemble natural spoken conversations. The results of this study will help SLTs and teachers in their planning content for SGDs as well as in teaching, and guiding aided communicators and their partners to utilize PS utterances in combination with SBS utterances during their conversations.