Chapter 2 - Message Management Flashcards
Message management includes…
the formulation, storage, or retrieval of single words, codes, and messages to support face-to-face, written, and social media communication.
It is important for those who rely on AAC and those who assist them to carefully review the language content included within an AAC device to …
determine if it meets the cultural, social, care, and medical needs of the particular individual.
The central goal of AAC is to provide individuals with the opportunity and capability to …
1) communication messages so that they can interact in conversations
2) participate in communication at home, in school, at work, and during recreational activities
3) learn their native language(s)
4) establish and maintain their social roles
5) meet their personal needs
6) communicate accurately to guide their personal and medical care
Factors that may influence the types of messages used by different communicators
age, gender, social role, medical conditions
individual preferences, needs, environments / contexts,, differing life experiences,
education, social, religious, recreational, volunteer, vocational communities
personal experiences, transition from individual without disability to one with a chronic disability
Six adult social contexts (Bryen, 2008)
1/ College life 2/Sexuality 3/ Crime reporting (nearly 50% have experienced crime) 4/ Management of personal assistants 5/ Health care 6/ Transportation
Conversation structure
1/ Greeting - initiation 2/ Small talk 3/ Information-sharing (stories, procedural descriptions, content-specific conversations) 4/ Wrap-up remarks 5/ Final farewell
_______ are initiating social interactions
Greetings
Greetings …
- signal awareness of someone’s presence
- communicate the speaker’s intention to be friendly or interactive
- include a bid to start a conversation
Greetings require awareness of …
and should …
culture, social status, ages of individuals involved
include a range of culturally sensitive message options so that individuals are able to signal their awareness of social conventions
Small talk
A type of conversational exchange used for initiating and maintaining conversational interactions
- Allow for incremental sequence of social engagement and disengagement messages that seem necessary when people attempt to interact in a social setting.
- Often used as a transition between greeting and information-sharing stage, but may never progress further
Generic small tlak
Small talk that people can use with a variety of different conversational partners because it does not refer to specific shared information.
Rates of generic small talk by age
- Preschoolers: ~50%
- Young adults: ~39%
- 65-74: 31%
- 75-85: 26%
Narration
Storytelling, public speaking
Older adults in particular use…
stories to entertain, teach, and establish social closeness with their peers.
Types of stories
- First-person stories: have occurred to speaker personally
- Second-person stories: learned from others through listening or reading; permissible when credit given
- Official stories: stories used to teach a lesson, explain a phenomenon; frequent use by families, schools, religious groups
- Fantasy stories: made-up
In preschool children _____ of what is talked about involved some type of ______
9% (home), 11%(school), fantasy
________ may play an important role in storytelling
AAC Facilitators: assistance capturing stories; critical to understand because individualized to reflect personal experiences, interests, affiliations; May help to program AAC device by dividing story into segments that can be released sequentially; Providing chances to practice telling the story; Indexing according to main topics, key participants, major life events
Procedural Descriptions
Provide detailed information about processes or procedures
1) Rich in detail
2) Contain information that must be related sequentially
3) Require communication that is timely and efficient
Procedural Description examples
- procedures required for personal care and other specific needs
- giving directions
- telling someone a recipe
Content-Specific Conversations
Contain informational give and take.
Not scripted, vocabulary varies widely depending on factors including communication partners, topic, context, etc.
- Require ability to formulate unique and novel messages
Wrap-up remarks and farewell statements
- Used to signal desire or intent to end an interaction
- Terminate conversation with farewell statements
The words with which people communicate are greatly influenced by…
different communication contexts and modalities
Differences between spoken and written communication
- Spoken: more personal references, 1st and 2nd person pronouns, less lexical diversity, shorter thought units, more monosyllabic and familiar words , more subordinate ideas
- Writing: more diverse vocabulary
School-talk vs Home-talk
Children do not use language for the same purposes at school as they do at home.
Home: expectation of shared assumptions (implicit meaning)
School: Interpreting overtly lexicalized intentions (explicit meaning)
1/3 of vocabulary spoken only at school, 1/3 spoken only at home, 1/3 spoken at both home and school
100 words account for
60% of those produced at school by TD children (Beukelman, Jones, Rowan, 1989)
School vocabulary
Content varies across subjects, changes daily, weekly
Success depends on availability of appropriate vocabulary
Vocabulary - age variables
- People produce fewer proper nouns, more general nouns, and more ambiguous references as they age
- Lexical variety of nominal and syntactic structures decreases
- Size of active expressive vocabularies decreases markedly during 70s
- Older adults tailor communicative interactions to unique task of “telling”, information sharing
Vocabulary - gender variables
Men: fewer pronouns, more adjectives, unusual adverbs, and prepositions; reference to time, space, quantity, destructive actions more often; topics are work, legal matters, taxes, army experience, sports or amusement
Women: more auxiliary words and negations; refer to to motivations, feelings, emotions, and themselves more; topics are people, personal lives/interpersonal matters, household needs, books, food, clothes, decorations
______ are perhaps the best source of knowledge about an individual’s specific vocabulary needs, and AAC teams should use their insights as a resource to select appropriate vocabulary.
Peer informants
Vocabulary - preliterate individuals
- Have not yet developed reading and writing skills
- AAC system uses 1+ symbol/code sets
- Vocabulary needs divided in two categories
1/ vocabulary needed to communicate essential messages
2/ vocabulary needed to develop language skills
Vocabulary - coverage vocabulary
Vocabulary needed to communicate essential messages
- Must include many coverage vocabulary items, regardless of frequency of use
- Highly dependent on communication needs of individual
- Selected through careful analyses of environmental and communication needs
- Commonly organized by context (environment, activity; or themes/levels in SGD)
- May situate activity boards strategically in environment where activity takes place , or in a carrying case /notebook
Vocabulary - developmental vocabulary
- Vocabulary individual does not yet know, selected to encourage language and vocabulary growth
- Should include words or messages that encourage use of a variety of language structures/ combinations
- e.g. more, no, there, variety of nouns/verbs/adjectives to encourage word combinations
Vocabulary - developmental vocabulary should include words from at least the following semantic categories (Lahey and Bloom, 1977):
1/ substantive words 2/ relational words 3/ Generic verbs 4/ Specific verbs 5/ Emotional state words 6/ Affirmation / negation words 7/ Recurrence/discontinuation words 8/ Proper names for people first and personal pronouns later 9/ Single adjectives first and their polar opposites later 10/ Relevant colours 11/ Relevant prepositions
Common core vocabulary words in Banajee, Dicarlo, Stricklin (2003)
I, no, yeah/yes, want, it, that, my, you, more
mine, the, is, on, in, here, out, off, a, go, who, some, help, all done/finished
** No nouns! **
Vocabulary - nonliterate individuals
- Unable to spell well enough to formulate messages on letter-by-letter basis and not expected to develop/regain these spontaneous spelling skills
- Mostly unable to read, except some functional sight word reading
- Vocabulary selection aims to meet daily, ongoing communication needs in variety of environments
Vocabulary - how does vocabulary for nonliterate individuals differ?
- nearly always chosen from a functional rather than developmental perspective
- Single words, or more often whole messages selected to meet individual communication need s
- Very important that coverage vocabulary be age and gender appropriate (e.g. happy face vs. thumbs up symbol)
- some developmental vocabulary, added when encountering new environments/opportunities, with the goal of expanding number of words/concepts rather than use of complex syntactic forms
Vocabulary - literate individuals
Have access to greater variety of message preparation options; able to formulate messages on letter-by-letter and word-by-word basis, and to retrieve complete messages once they have been stored
- timing enhancement
- message acceleration
- fatigue reduction
- social media
Vocabulary - literate individuals - timing enhancement
Messages that require careful timing for appropriateness
- Improves effectiveness of communication
- e.g. Please pick up my feet before you roll my wheelchair forward
- e.g. Wait a minute, I’m not finished yet
Vocabulary - literate individuals - message acceleration
Accelerate overall communication rate
- words/messages that occur so frequently and are so lengthy that the use of an encoding strategy to retrieve them results in substantial keystroke savings
Vocabulary - literate individuals - fatigue reduction
Vocabulary set selected for people who are literate that results in reduced fatigue. Often the same set as acceleration vocabulary.
Fatigue is cumulative problem for some people (AM may be more efficient using AAC) – so vocab should be selected to cover part of day where individual is more fatigued (PM)
Vocabulary - literate individuals - social media
Communication conventions differ considerably from face-to-face communication; extensive use of abbreviations and codes, grammatically incomplete messages, limited punctuation to reduce number of keystrokes
Core Vocabulary
Words and messages that are commonly used by a variety of individuals and occur very frequently.
- Three sources to identify core vocabularies for specific individuals:
1/ word lists based on vocabulary-use patterns of other people with CCN who use AAC systems;
2/ word lists based on the use patterns of the individual
3/ word lists based on the performance of natural speakers or writers in similar contexts
Core Vocabulary selection - people who communicate through AAC
Approximately 80% of words communicated by five individuals were represented by the 500 most frequently occurring words.
AAC users actually used between 27% - 60% of words included in various published lists
Floorholder messages for telephone communication
Core Vocabulary selection - use patterns of specific individual
Compiled from past performance of specific individual
- Performance measurement and analysis technology is included in many AAC devices to help monitor vocabulary-use patterns of an individual
- Privacy concerns to be aware of (tracking/monitoring)
Core Vocabulary selection - TD speakers/writers
Composite lists based on vocabulary use of typical speakers/writers
- Rich source of core vocabulary information
- Contains only a fraction of words that will be needed
- Good source of potential words , time saving, strategies required to eliminate unnecessary/costly words
Fringe Vocabulary
Vocabulary words and messages specific or unique to the individual
e.g. names of specific people, locations, activities, preferred expressions, special interests
Serve to personalize the vocabulary in AAC system and allow expression of ideas and messages that do not appear in core vocabulary lists
- Must be recommended by informants who know them or their communicative situations quite well
Fringe vocabulary – most important source
Individual who relies on AAC system themself (ability to serve as informant depends on age, cognitive and language abilities, level of facilitator support provided)
Fringe vocabulary - informants
AAC team should consult with multiple informants to obtain best possible list of fringe words
Spouses, parents, siblings, teachers, other caregivers, employers, co-workers, peers, and friends
Parents, SLPs, teachers – each contributed important number of fringe words to composite vocabularies for child participants, none could be eliminated from vocabulary selection process
Vocabulary selection processes
Initial vocabulary items should
1/ be of high interest to the individual,
2/ have potential for frequent use
3/ denote a range of semantic notions and pragmatic functions
4/ reflect the “here and now” for ease of learning
5/ have potential for later multiword use
6/ provide ease of production or interpretatoin
Vocabulary selection - environmental or ecological inventories
- Discriminate between observation and participation events
- AAC team observes and documents the vocabulary words used by peers both with and without disabilities during frequently occurring activities, reducing pool of items to a list of most critical words that the individual can manage
Vocabulary selection - communication diaries and checklists
- Records of the words or phrases needed in a variety of contexts, usually kept by informants throughout hte day
- MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory may be useful as shortcut to vocabulary selection by providing ideas
Vocabulary Maintenance
Vocabulary selection is an ongoing process;
Some words/phrases may be used less frequently because they were poorly chosen initially or because they have outlived usefulness
Items for use in special contexts should be eliminated from available lexicon once not needed to make space for other, more important words and to reduce the cognitive load for the individuals
