Browsing by Subject "avusteinen viestintä"
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(2021)Aim. Compared to spoken conversations, achieving mutual understanding may be more at risk when one or more participants use aided communication. An aided communicator may take a passive role in conversations and may not have adequate strategies to repair conversational breakdowns when they occur. The aim of this study was to describe how an aided communicator may attempt to solve the problems he encounters in conversations with his speaking communication partners. Aided communicator’s repair strategies, causes of breakdowns and partners’ influence on repair phenomena were studied. This study may help professionals to acknowledge the threats that compromise achieving mutual understanding in aided conversations and recognize some of the strategies in overcoming potential communication disrupts. Method. Within the framework of data driven qualitative analysis this case study examined videotaped conversations, where an 11-year-old boy using communication book communicated with his mom, teacher and peer. The data was originally videotaped as a part of the international research project Becoming an Aided Communicator. Data driven analysis was considered as an appropriate method for studying a topic with limited previous research. Results and conclusion. Almost all of the aided communicator’s repairs were self-initiated self-repairs and the rest were other-initiated self-repairs. The former occurred mostly as responses to the partner’s misinterpretations and operational difficulties while the latter followed requests for clarifications. Aided communicator repaired by repeating or modifying his utterances or by adding new elements to the original utterance. For repairs he utilized nonverbal modalities: gaze, gestures and actions. In some exchanges, he changed modality. Reasons for the misinterpretations and requests for clarifications emerged from the linguistic limitations of the graphic communication system and partner’s difficulty in understanding the aided communicator’s nonverbal communicative acts. Operational challenges seemed to be related to partner’s experience with using communication aids that affected the fluency of communication. Partners’ varying familiarity with aided communication seemed to affect the need to repair and the effectivity of repair. In addition, the shared competence of the dyad influenced achieving mutual understanding. For the best results of support and guidance, speech and language therapists should emphasize finding out the communicator’s individual strategies in repair as well as effective practices to use a communication book. This could be implemented by video-based observations.
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(2020)Aims: Aided communication has been noted to differ both developmentally and in practise from speaking in many ways, often being significantly more compact, more incomplete and slower. It has also been noted that a speaking listener’s active role as a co-constructive assistant easily reduces the independency of the aided narrative. There is very little research especially of aided narrative skills of children and ad-olescents using a communication book. There is also need for workable evaluation methods.The aim of this case study was to describe the narrative features of a 15-year old boy using a communication book in depicting silent videos, and the things that affected the independency of his aided communication. Methods: The 18 narration tasks with three different communication partners were transcribed. The transcription was then interpreted by tasks and by partners based on the material. The success of the nar-rations was compared to the video events with a four-step assessment scale, and the diversity of the nar-rations was described by counting and classifying the used symbols and sentence structures. The defi-ciency in expression was compared with the vocabulary in the book. The efficiency of the examinee’s symbol expression was also measured. The micro- and macrostructures and the fluency of the independ-ent narration was measured using the Narrative Assessment Profile. The partners’ influence on the narra-tion was observed at a general level. Results: The examined adolescent could quite often get to a result compatible with video events and flexibly use his often insufficient communication book vocabulary. In every task, he was able to stay on topic and correctly sequence the events he expressed. The results supported previous findings about the compact, slow and incomplete expression of the aided communication that is sometimes even disrupted by a partner’s active participation. Especially the amount of extra questions in a co-constructed aided narration supposedly affected its fluency, explicitness and effectiveness as well as the number of inde-pendent utterances. Conclusions: One cannot draw direct conclusions from a single case, and also the other abilities of the examinee had an effect on the performance for their part. Over the analysing process, it was noticed that the aided communicator actively adjust their planned narration on many levels to support their partners’ understanding. Thus, the inappropriate features in speaking may turn out to be appropriate, considering the situation, and vice versa. Narration adjusted to situation and vocabulary may thus, despite its ostensi-ble conciseness, embody the aided narrator’s strategic competence, where the communication partner has a crucial supporting role.
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(2023)Aim. People who cannot communicate by speech the way they want to, need augmentative and alternative communication systems, AAC. Aided communicators are often characterized as passive in interactions involving aided communication. However, conversations are always co-constructed, and all conversational partners impact on them with their own actions. The aim of this study was to identify and describe how conversations are co-constructed in these situations. Moreover, the aim was to describe which communication moves, pragmatic functions, and modes of communication were utilized across three different dyads. Method. The thesis used mixed methods research, where the phenomena were examined mainly with qualitative methods. In addition, quantitative methods were used for comparison between pairs. The participants of the study were 8-year-old Sara and her three conversation partners: a mother, a teacher, and a peer. Sara communicated with a communication book, and using gaze, gestures, and single words. The data was part of an international research project Becoming an aided communicator (BAC): Aided language skills in children aged 5–15 years – a multi-site and cross-cultural investigation. The data consisted of videoed and transcribed material from video event description tasks. Six video event descriptions from each Sara-conversation partner-dyad, 18 in total, were chosen for analyses. The data analysis followed the analysis method used by Pennington and McConachie (2001). The data were analyzed to identify how conversations are structured using structure of move, pragmatic functions, and mode of communication. Results and conclusions. The study showed that communicative moves and pragmatic functions were distributed similarly between different dyads. Sara’s communication partners differed in how they used the modes of communication with Sara. The teacher used the communication aids more than the peer or the mother. The study highlights Sara’s active role in all interactions. She contributed to the progress of the conversations with her own actions and initiatives. The study reinforces observations from previous studies concluding that aided conversations are often constructed by question-and-answer sequences. However, in part, it challenges previous studies indicating that the aided communicator would always have a passive role and the speaking partner would dominate interaction situations.
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