The field of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) has evolved since the 1970s, consequently there now exists a group of adults with cerebral palsy (CP), in the UK, who are life-time users of AAC prescribed as an intervention for their complex communication impairments. Ten adults, aged between 20-55 years, participated in conversations about their unique life experiences and aspirations, using AAC, including voice output communication aids (VOCAs). The ability and opportunity to interact and communicate personal accounts has significance for conceptualizing outcomes of intervention. Clinical practice informed this research project. A qualitative research design was employed to explore questions about the extent to which adult aided communicators talk about their lives, aspirations and opinions; the past life experiences participants talk about and finally how they talk about their quality of life. Conversational-styled, semi-structured interviewing using literature-guided questions yielded rich interactional data. A discourse analytical approach to the 34 interviews was taken. Findings identified a number of ordinary interactional features and discourses. Aided communicators used multimodal communication to interact and converse, positioning through their contributions as assertive speakers and engaged recipients. Interactional turns were managed with participants using unaided communication signals as conversational continuers. Participants demonstrated how to manage others who speak on their behalf. Examples of interactional repair were noted when participants pre-empted breakdown. Managing novel utterances was a feature with unexpected responses challenging the listener’s position. Participants constructed VOCA-mediated utterances to share long-term memories, worries, satisfaction with life, and aspirations. Aspirations included community ambitions and creating fulfilling daily lives. Some participants expressed frustration but balanced this against a position of contentment. Some participants also demonstrated personal responsibility and positioned themselves through their talk as contributors to communities. Recommendations for clinical practice are suggested that include the provision of adult clinical services and interaction focused intervention for adult aided communicators with cerebral palsy.

Today’s global markets demand global processes. Increasingly, these processes are not only distributed, but also contain mobile aspects. We discuss two challenges brought about by these mobile business processes: Firstly, the need to specify the distribution of processes across several sites, and secondly, the need to specify the dialog flows of the applications implementing those processes on mobile devices. To remedy the first challenge, we give an overview of the Process Landscaping method with its support for refining processes across multiple abstraction layers and associating their activities and objects with distinguished locations. Next, we present a Dialog Flow Notation and Dialog Control Framework for the specification and management of complex hypertext-based dialog flows. These tools allow developers to build user interfaces for mobile client devices with different input/output capabilities, which all access the same application logic on a central server.

Children with limited speech using graphic symbols for communication often express themselves predominantly through single symbols rather than symbol combinations. This study aimed to investigate the effect of an intervention strategy that was incorporated into shared storybook reading on the production of graphic symbol combinations. Three children between the ages of 7;9 (years;months) and 10;8 with limited speech and physical impairments participated in the study. A multiple probe design across behaviours (3 different types of semantic symbol combinations) was used, replicated across the 3 participants. Intervention entailed prompting the production of strategic symbol combinations (generated from a matrix) during shared storybook reading by using a prompting hierarchy. The participants’ production of combinations targeted during intervention as well as their ability to generalize to nontarget combinations from the matrix was monitored using a probe test (picture description task). All 3 participants showed some gains in acquiring the combinations and generalizing to nontarget combinations, as measured by the probe test. While 1 participant showed convincing effects, the other 2 showed lower effects. Lower effects may be partly ascribed to participant characteristics as well as to the discrepancies between the intervention and probe contexts. All participants performed better within the shared storybook reading context. Results suggest that the production of symbol combinations can be facilitated during shared storybook reading and that the matrix strategy promotes generalization to untrained semantic combinations. However, participant gains may not reflect immediately in formal testing situations. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Centre for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (CAAC) / unrestricted