Norén, N., Svensson, E., & Telford, J. (2013). Participants’ dynamic orientation to folder navigation when using a VOCA with a touch screen in talk-in-interaction. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 29(1), 20–36. https://doi.org/10.3109/07434618.2013.767555
This study investigated conversations between a 13-year-old boy with cerebral palsy who uses a voice output communication aid (VOCA) and his teacher, examining how their orientation to the VOCA display became a shared resource for co-construction of AAC-mediated turns. The AAC user’s embodied resources, graphic symbol selections and folder navigation projected AAC-mediated turns, and the teacher responded to these projections by co-constructing or repairing the turn. In extract 1, the teacher used the visible navigation processes of embodied actions (e.g., hand movements) and folder selections to interpret and contribute to the construction of a VOCA-mediated turn in its beginning phases. The teacher’s timed use breaths and speech sounds influenced the student’s symbol selection during folder navigation; the teacher’s use of in-breath and “pt” was treated by the student as an objection, that resulted in the student not selecting that folder symbol, while the teacher’s vocalization (i.e.., mm?) was treated by the student as a continuer, resulting in the student’s selection of that folder. In extract 2, the teacher used the student’s embodied actions as a projective resource for more directively influencing the construction of an AAC-mediated turn through initiating other-repair. The teacher disregarded the student’s attempts to begin a new topic that was an abrupt change, using a step-wise series of increasingly directive prompts (e.g., prompt for information, question, explicit direction, challenge of student’s knowledge). These prompts reflected the teacher’s stance of the student’s topic change being in disalignment with the sequence, encouraging the student to instead produce a self-repair of a follow-up question to the formerly established topic.