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Bruce R. Baker
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Katya Hill
Edinboro State University
Edinboro, Pennsylvania
Richard Devylder
Long Beach, California
Large amounts of time are dispensed to fine tune vocabulary in
augmentative communication systems for specific environments. Is
this effort necessary or even beneficial? Few subjects in
augmentative communication have been studied more intensely than
vocabulary selection. Instructional courses at the American
Speech-Language Hearing Association dating back for more than 15
years have been devoted to vocabulary selection. The language
used by people with disabilities has been studied extensively.
Many published proposals have produced guidelines as well as
specific lists. Frequent articles in refereed journals have not
only discussed vocabulary selection, but charts, tables,
harvesting methodologies, etc. have been a regular feature of
non-refereed publications as well. Recommendations to crawl about
the room in order to view the world from a child's perspective as
well as long questionnaires asked of adult users concerning what
they would say, etc. have attracted the attention of the best
researchers.
In current augmentative communication practice, large amounts of
time are used to develop special vocabularies for classes, field
trips, activity-based learning, and a host of other academic and
non-academic environments. The vocabulary, for example, of earth
sciences is considered to be radically different from that of
seventh grade social studies. The vocabulary needed to describe
molestation is considered highly specialized. Functional
vocabulary for a restaurant includes menu items, requests for
condiments, expressions of preference like rare, medium, and well
done. A nature walk has its own special vocabulary which must be
added to each device before summer camping experiences. In short,
vocabulary selection for augmentative communication systems is
one area of intense thought and labor in the clinical
field.
As appropriate as such work seems to our intuition, the search
for powerful, context specific nouns to be used in differing
environments flies in the face of long, established linguistic
principles. In the past century, linguists and second language
teachers have discovered that a core vocabulary of fewer than a
thousand words can provide semantic coverage for nearly every
idea expressible in a human language. The most famous effort to
express all the notions conceivable in English in a restrained
vocabulary was called Basic English. Basic English, however, is
one, among many. Using its 800 words and appropriate morphology
for those words, a person can express nearly everything that the
English language can express.
Spoken language studies from elicited and spontaneously
generated speech have shown that the 100 most frequently
occurring words of a linguistic sample typically account for more
than 60 percent of the total words communicated. Typically, the
top 100 to 200 words account for 80 percent of the total words
communicated. The phenomenon of a core of words with high
frequency accounting for a majority of words communicated is not
limited to English. Similar samples in German, French, Spanish,
Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Dutch known to the authors
show similar statistics.
In augmentative communication various language corpora assembled
throughout the past 20 years have shown that children,
adolescents, and adults use the same core vocabulary. Further,
these studies show that the same core vocabulary is used across
environments. Stated bluntly, natural speakers would exhibit the
same personal pronoun profile in a one half hour language sample
taken in a restaurant as they would in one harvested in a walk
through a zoo. "Look at that Flamingo. I don't think I've ever
seen anything that color before. It's standing on one leg. Does
it have two? Where's its other one? Wait a minute. I think I see
it. Etc., etc., etc."
It does not take a strong imagination to imagine the preceding
communication to be completely capable of delivery with the
omission of the word "flamingo" and the substitution of a
pointing gesture. What is the most frequent word in the preceding
35 word imaginary corpus? "I" is tied with "it." Personal
pronouns account for eight of 35. These two personal pronouns
make up 22.9 percent of the total words spoken. The only non-core
word here is, of course, "flamingo" and accounts for 2.9 percent
of the sample. Yet which of the words in the sample would be
typically selected for inclusion in a special AAC zoo
vocabulary?
Language is an awkward fact we all frequently chose to ignore.
Everyday speech is made up of core vocabulary and grammatical
morphemes yet these are not the focus of vocabulary development
in augmentative communication. Instead we focus on the "power
words" in each environment. We think of fringe vocabulary as
powerful words because simply by mentioning one, it is possible
for a conversational partner to fill in the blanks. However, when
we allow the conversational partner to fill in the blanks, what
we are doing is allow him or her to guide the conversation,
direct its contents, and many other things typically developed
speakers would never allow.
Let's take a look at another sentence. "I went to the museum
yesterday and saw a dinosaur." There are ten words in this
sentence. Two of them are context specific - museum and dinosaur.
Eight of them are core words. However, which of these words would
appeal to an augmentative communication system vocabulary
manager? Museum and dinosaur would be considered the most
powerful or novel words because pointing to graphics illustrating
these words or speaking these words on a voice output system
would enable the conversational partner to fill in the blanks.
The envisioned Conversation would feature an augmented
communicator who would first say or point to "museum." The
conversational partner would say "Oh, you went to a museum. Did
you have a good time?" The augmented communicator would reply by
uttering or pointing to "dinosaur." The conversational partner
would then say "You saw the dinosaur. Was it interesting to see a
dinosaur?"
The benign vision portrayed by the preceding interaction could,
however, have gone in just the opposite way. The conversation
partner could have said, "Museum?! You went there yesterday. I am
not going to get another trip together for you. Boy, you guys,
give an inch and you take a mile. You don't appreciate anything
we do. Your attitude makes me sick." Folks, this is language
reality. How could the augmented communicator dig him or herself
out of the hole brought about in the second imaginary
interaction? Personal autonomy is best effected by control of
core vocabulary.
If an augmented communicator had control of core vocabulary, he
or she could have said, "I went somewhere yesterday. It was fun.
We saw old things." The conversational partner might reply, "I
know. Who do you think organized it? I'm glad you had a good
time. I'll organize some more trips for you guys, if you liked
that one."
Which is easier to do? Organize and teach an effective structure
for 200 core words and their grammatical morphemes or the near
random cast of extended vocabulary that float through every
individual's life? In our opinion, it is core vocabulary that
liberates. The fact that the same core vocabulary is used across
all environments gives one in control of core vocabulary
functionality across environments. Although topics change, core
vocabulary is consistent. In Sheela Stuart's work with older
people, she divided her cohorts into two groups: younger age, 60
to 74 years and older age, 78 to 85 years. She further divided
the groups into male and female. The results of topic analysis
indicated difference between older age cohorts and younger age
cohorts and between men and women. The greatest differences were
between younger women and older men. The topic various included
present versus past, family versus friends, household routines
versus facts, and so on. Nevertheless, there was no significant
difference in the frequency of use for the composite 250 most
frequently occurring words.
The augmentative communication community has failed to
assimilate the power of these data. Stuart's work, while
pioneering, is far from alone. A host of other researchers have
found similar data. Rather than focussing on core vocabulary
which is consistent across groups and across environments, the
augmentative communication community has chosen to focus on the
difficult business of trying to pair fringe or extended
vocabulary words in various environments. The lesson being
sought, for instance, from Susan Balandin's collection of one of
the largest spontaneous spoken corpora is not that topic and,
hence, fringe vocabulary is impossible to predict, but how, given
this impossibility can we go about selecting fringe vocabulary
anyway.
The authors of this paper suggest that since, with core
vocabulary one can express virtually any idea, and that since
core vocabulary is consistent across all naturally speaking
populations, in all environments, the field of augmentative
communication should focus on representing and teaching core
vocabulary in augmentative communication systems.
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