Alphabet Board Research Articles

Fostering Emergent Literacy for Children Who Require AAC

Literacy skills also provide access to increased generative capacity and vocabulary access via AAC systems such as alphabet boards and computer-based speech-generating devices. Finally, literacy skills facilitate access to mainstream technologies such as the Internet that may be used to bypass communication limitations in face-to-face conversations, enhance education, and expand employment opportunities (e.g., tele-employment).

Attitudes of children toward a similar-aged child who uses augmentative communication

Two videotape recordings were made of a boy who was physically disabled and nonspeaking. In one, the child communicated using a nonelectronic alphabet board and, in the other, a high-technology augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) device. The Chedoke-McMaster Attitudes Toward Children with Handicaps (CATCH) scale was used to assess the attitudes of fifth graders toward this child. One group of fifth graders attended schools in which children with disabilities were integrated. Another group attended schools in which children with disabilities were not integrated. Within these groups, one subgroup watched the nonelectronic video and one the high-technology video. Results indicated significant effects of gender and school on attitude scores, but not of video viewed. Possible reasons, clinical implications, and directions for future research are discussed.

Ethical issues related to the use of facilitated communication techniques with persons with autism.

AbstractThe use of Facilitated Communication techniques recently introduced and now widely used with persons with autism poses a number of ethical dilemmas for psychologists. These dilemmas stem from the lack of empirical support for the validity of messages communicated with facilitation. Using the CPA Code of Ethics for Psychologists (1991) as a guide, this paper will highlight a number of ethical issues pertinent to psychologists working with clients who use Facilitated Communication techniques.In the past few years, the use of Facilitated Communication techniques (F/C) with autistic individuals has become a topic of considerable controversy (Cummins & Prior, 1992; Prior & Cummins, 1992; Rimland, 1990). Facilitated Communication (F/C) involves the physical support of a person's arm, wrist or hand by a facilitator to enable them to use equipment such as electronic typewriters, computer keyboards, or alphabet and picture boards for purposes of communication. Much of the controversy stems from the fact that the validity of messages communicated when using a facilitator remains to be established empirically. Guided by the ethical principles outlined by the Canadian Psychological Association (1991), this paper will discuss the ethical dilemmas faced by psychologists working with clients and their families or caregivers who use this mode of communication.Since the introduction of F/C in Australia in 1988 by Rosemary Crossley, and then in the United States in 1990 by Douglas Biklen, there have been many reports of autistic individuals who were either mute or echolalic suddenly demonstrating literacy and numeracy skills with the use of facilitated communication (Rimland, 1990). F/C has challenged previous notions regarding the nature of autism, and as a result, has sparked new hope and enthusiasm for parents, caregivers and teachers of individuals with autism. However, the claims made by proponents of F/C also have prompted considerable controversy. Although, calls for controlled evaluations (Cummins & Prior, 1992; Minnes, 1992) have been resisted by proponents of the technique, increasing numbers of cases of alleged abuse communicated through F/C (Rimland, 1992) have resulted in a growing number of research studies.Three major paradigms outlined by Schwartz and Jacobson (1993) have been used. In the first, questions are posed but facilitators do not have access to information presented to the person being facilitated. Auditory information may be altered through the use of earphones (Hudson, Melita & Arnold, 1993; Perry, Bryson & Bebko, 1993) or visual screening may be used to prevent facilitators from viewing stimulus materials or possible responses (Perry et al., 1993; Wheeler, Jacobson, Paglieri & Schwartz, 1993). In the vast majority of studies using such approaches, results uniformly indicate that correct responses to questions or correct naming of pictures or objects are rarely possible when the information is not available to the facilitator. Indeed, when subjects and facilitator are presented with different information, the typed responses most frequently are appropriate for the information presented to the facilitator.A second approach which has been seen to be less confrontational involves message passing (Perry, Bryson, & Bebko, 1994). In this case, questions are asked about events or activities which have occurred or information presented in the absence of the facilitator, or the subject is merely asked to tell the facilitator about what happened while they were out of the room. The results of studies using this approach indicate that appropriate communications have occurred only in cases where the subject was able to type independently (Schwartz & Jacobson, 1993).In a third approach known as a training model, gains in cognitive and language skills are measured as clients and facilitators are trained. While increasing skill in F/C has been documented in these studies, comparable gains in the ability to name objects or letters or to recognize words have not been found (Schwartz & Jacobson, 1993). …

Communication problems in the intensive care unit

Hospitalization in an intensive care unit is often physically uncomfortable and socially disorganizing. The ordinary forms of conversational participation that generate and sustain a sense of agency are breached when the patient cannot communicate in socially consensual “real time.” Using my own experience in an intensive care unit, I describe how delayed speech, through the use of an alphabet board, frequently leads to a host of interactional problems and mutual accusations about character. I attempt to show that the fabric of self and the perception of quality of care are achieved through “real time” communication. I also describe the differential communicative structure of those who will not and those who will use my alphabet board. Those using the board exhibit, through board employment and through the “local” topics discussed, a depth of common culture between them and me.

Beyond the Ouija board: dialogue and heteroglossia in the medical narrative.

^Beyond the Ouija Board: Dialogue and Heteroglossia in the Medical Narrative* John Wiltshire In the case history of "Leonard L," the last of the narratives about patients that form the central core of Oliver Sacks's Awakenings, Leonard, lying paralyzed in bed, communicates with the outside world by means of "a small letter board."1 Though deprived almost totally of voluntary motion and speech by the effects of viral encephalitis, bereft of normal expressive capacity, Leonard has been able to continue to read, to write reviews—even, so one is told, to run the hospital's library. There is no suggestion that he is in a coma or "dead inside": his ability to write, to communicate by means of his board, assures the reader of that. In Penny Marshall's film version of Awakenings,2 released in 1990, Leonard is a very different figure. He cannot use an alphabet board because he has no movement in his fingers. In fact, he has no movement at all. No longer in the least an intellectual, Leonard is totally wooden, inert. He sits or lies like a zombie, moved, dressed, and manicured by his mother, visually incarnating absence, blankness, and intellectual death. But young Dr. Sayer—the movie's version of Sacks—believes that beneath their post-encephalitic, Parkinsonian inertia the patients are intellectually alive, despite all the scorn the hospital administration pours on this idea, and despite the eminent older neurologist's emphatic declaration that such a possibility is "unthinkable." The film makes much of the patients' capacity for movement if they "borrow the will" of something else—a ball, perhaps, or music. For Leonard, that will evidently is Dr. Sayer's. He provides Leonard, for the first time, * The author thanks Dr. Paul Komesaroff for his helpful comments and suggestions . Literature and Medicine 13, no. 2 (Fall 1994) 211-228 © 1994 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 212 DIALOGUE AND HETEROGLOSSIA IN THE MEDICAL NARRATIVE with a means of communication with the outside world, and the spelling board becomes a ouija board, the traditional means of communicating with the dead via a medium.3 In a close-up shot, we see the hands of the patient on the board, and the hands of the doctor guiding them. Under his hands, Leonard's fingers spell out the letters rilke's PANTHER, which is all that Sayer needs to confirm his faith that Leonard is indeed, despite all signs, fully alive inside, a caged animal pacing behind the bars of his illness. Through the medium of the doctor, under his healing hands, Leonard the patient gains the power of expression, language, a voice. Dr. Sayer is the means through which the patient speaks and, through his speaking, is discovered to experience an inner life. This patient is a distinct individual with a story of his own. Yet at the same time his own voice comes to him through the doctor, who is thus Dr. say-er indeed. This dramatic incident raises a question that is central to modern medicine. What is the status of the patient's story or the patient's voice? As presented in the film, the patient's access to language, to a form of speech, is routed through the doctor. It might, to a skeptical observer, be doubtful whether Leonard does indeed express himself when his words are, literally, in the hands of the physician. The film's visual metaphor defines a difficulty that critics have noted in Sacks's writings themselves. He declares of his patients: "They themselves encouraged me, and said to me from the first, 'Tell our story—or it will never be known.'"4 His patients cannot tell their own stories, yet in transcribing their speech the doctor-narrator often, as commentators have remarked, seems to conflate or merge his imagination and words with theirs.5 In Sacks's earlier writings there is a tendency for the speech of patients to take on the cadences and idiom of the doctor, so that we experience the patient less as an independently existing point of view and experience than as a vehicle of the physician's own construction and understanding of the case. He becomes, like the...

The Effects of Information and Augmentative Communication Technique on Attitudes Toward Nonspeaking Individuals

This study investigated the effects of printed factual information and three augmentative communication techniques on attitudes of nondisabled individuals toward nonspeaking persons with physical disabilities. Employing a 3 (augmentative communication techniques) x 2 (presence/absence of information) factorial design, subjects viewed a videotape depicting a nonspeaking adult having a conversation with a normal-speaking individual. Subjects in Condition 1 viewed a tape depicting the nonspeaking individual using unaided communication techniques; Condition 2 subjects viewed the individual using an alphabet board; subjects in Condition 3 viewed the individual using a computer-based voice output communication aid (VOCA). A scale assessing attitudes toward nonspeaking persons, the Attitudes Toward Nonspeaking Persons Scale (ATNP), was developed and validated for purposes of this study and was employed as the dependent measure. Results revealed that subjects expressed more favorable attitudes when provided with the additional information concerning the nonspeaking individual. Attitude favorability also increased with the sophistication of the augmentative communication technique.

102. Alphabet Boards.

102. Alphabet Boards.