Defense Date

7-25-2007

Graduation Date

Summer 2007

Availability

Immediate Access

Submission Type

thesis

Degree Name

MSSLP

Department

Speech-Language Pathology (SLP)

School

Rangos School of Health Sciences

Committee Chair

Kathryn L. Garrett

Committee Member

Yang Chen

Keywords

aphasia, augmentative and alternative communication (AAC, conversation, quantitative analysis, story telling, visual scenes display

Abstract

This multiple single-subject research study measured quantitative differences in communication success, communicator roles and act functions during dyadic conversational interactions between six people with severe aphasia and their peer communication partners across three conditions involving a type of augmentative communication intervention, speech generating devices (SGDs). Researchers assessed these variables across four conditions involving the message display of the SGD: no display (Condition A), visual scenes (contextual photographic) display (Condition B), Traditional Grid Display (Condition C), while participants engage in conversational story telling. This study is important because technology is currently being developed to assist people with aphasia to access messages stored on an SGD by activating photographic representations that access a set of spoken messages that are related to the photo. This contrasts with a more traditional method of representing messages, in which decontextual line drawings associated with individual concepts are displayed on the screen. Results from this study indicate that interactions between peer communication partners and people with aphasia can and do benefit from external, symbolic representation of messages on AAC devices. However, an unexpected finding was that given too much contextual information as with visual scenes, peer communication partners can deduce the content and context of the story, thereby being more apt to dominate the conversation than they are with no display.

Format

PDF

Language

English

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