AAC-RERC Themes

Enhancing Access for Users with Cognitive/Linguistic Limitations

Early AAC efforts focused on face-to face communication by persons with physical disabilities. These strategies assumed that people who used AAC had intact language and cognitive abilities and only needed to make their communication efforts audible. AAC technology developed to meet the needs of these individuals provided physical access, but was cognitively and linguistically demanding; therefore, requiring considerable ability or extensive instruction. More recently, the needs and capabilities of persons across the life span, who have cognitive and linguistic limitations, have received the attention of the intervention, research, and commercial AAC communities. The cognitive/linguistic loads and learning demands of current AAC technologies make today's AAC devices very difficult to use for young children, children and adults with severe multiple disabilities, individuals with autism, and persons who acquire cognitive /language limitations later in life (especially because of cortical stroke). As a result, many of these individuals cannot meet their range of communication needs with the technology available today. This theme addresses an unmet need of a very large segment of individuals by developing access strategies that reduce cognitive and linguistic load and by designing AAC technology that allows increased support from listeners and AAC facilitators.

The following projects are associated with this theme:

• R1-A: Literacy Support Technologies for AAC Users
• R1-C: Specialized AAC Vocabulary Research
• R2-A: Contextual Scenes for Beginning Communicators
• R2-B: Contextual Scenes for Adults with Aphasia
• R2-C: Contextual Scenes and Intelligent Agents for Persons with Autism
• D1-A: Technology and Policy Watch
• D2-C: Gesture Recognition
• D3-B: Enhancing the Role of Listeners in AAC Interactions