AAC is all about making language accessible in order to help a person communicate better. When speech isn't an option - for example, if a person has a physical disability that makes their speech unclear; or difficulty with putting their thoughts together, or with language itself - and keeping in mind that spoken language is already a symbolic representation of ideas - then AAC solutions often look to further represent symbolically an already symbolic system. This can involve using symbols for input, or output, or both.
That sounds complicated, but the idea is to make it easier, right?
So for example if I can't think of the Welsh word for 'cat' or 'milk' or 'Brain Injury Rehabilitation Trust', I can look these up in a dictionary - I'm using a symbolic representation of the word as input to jog my memory and help me speak.
Or as another example if I go to a really loud concert and lose my voice and can only use text messages to get my point across, I'm using a symbolic representation - again, writing - as my output.
Symbols make things easier.
Kind of.
Essentially the problem for AAC users is that the twenty-six letters of the alphabet is a pretty excellent way of representing every word in the English language, ever, but if you can’t spell (and many of my clients are functionally illiterate), then writing is just not a great way of symbolising language. It doesn't make it easier. It doesn't make it accessible.
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| The Alphabet. Brilliant for writing, not so great if you're illiterate. (source: www.tyf.com) |
This is where the great logistical nightmare and emotional joyride (I’m not joking) of developing a pictorial system for language begins.
You could represent each word with a picture, but who has room to store and capacity to learn a million symbols for the English language?
Okay then, a million is a bit over the top; following the 80/20 (or is the 95/5?) rule of language, you could encode 3000 English words into symbols and be able to express most things you want to say. That’s a much more manageable number. In a physical book of 20 pictures per page, that’s about 75 pages, double sided.
If you categorise your pictures, then you speed up the process of trying to find the word you want (as long as you’re capable of using categories). But you have to be thoughtful with this approach. Take a word like “apple”- do you categorise it under ‘food’, or ‘things for home’, or ‘things for school lunch time’ or ‘types of operating system’? Potentially your categories are going to blow out to more than the number of words you started with.
There are more efficient systems, though. Minspeak, for example, doesn’t use scrapbook like categories for words. Instead, it allows each symbol to stand for multiple ideas, and then the particular sequence of symbols determines the meaning produced.
This isn’t an exact example from a device that uses Minspeak but it gives you the idea:
The apple symbol can mean lots of things. When you combine apple with the symbol for noun, you get “apple” ; when you combine it with the symbol for verb you get “eat”; and when you combine it with the symbol for adjective you get “hungry”.
Three words starting from one symbol.
Add a bed symbol and you get:
- bed + noun = “bed”
- bed + verb = “sleep”
- bed + adjective = “tired”
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| Another example of symbol combination, in Minspeak. The paintbrush symbolises "adjective", I think. |
A multi-meaning iconic system like Minspeak reduces the number of symbols you need to generate the largest possible set of ideas. It’s pretty brilliant. I’m in love with it, can you tell?
Unfortunately Minspeak can have – or be perceived to have – quite a steep learning curve, and I wouldn’t often use it with my clients who have particularly limited cognition. It’s much easier when a picture only symbolises one thing, right?
The question then is, if my client has capacity to use only a limited number of words (it may be cognitive capacity to understand; it may be physical capacity to access a device without fatiguing; whatever) – what words are going to be the most important, the most useful for them to say?
No really. If you could only use 100 words to communicate, what would they be? If you could only use 50? 20? 10?
This is a bugger of a question because often I find the most important words for a client are also the ones they’re already pretty good at communicating. Yes, no. Coffee, tea, food. Toilet. Go away. Unless someone has absolutely no way of talking, making sounds, or signing, these high-frequency, high-context words are surprisingly easy to understand.
So how do you organise the billowing mass of low-frequency, low-context words that a client needs to say but has doesn’t have capacity to sort through? To be honest, I’m not sure yet; a combination of a few approaches, I suspect, and something that I keep working on.
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