Sigurd Pilesjö, M., & Rasmussen, G. (2011). Exploring interaction between a non-speaking boy using aided AAC and his everyday communication partners: Features of turn organizing and turn design. Journal of Interactional Research in Communication Disorders, 2(2), 183–213. https://doi.org/10.1558/jircd.v2i2.183
This study examined the interactions of an 8;6-year-old boy with cerebral palsy with his mother at home, as well as his personal assistant and classmate at school. The aided communicator’s turn was characteristic of turns in that it oriented to the previous turn while expanding on it and making relevant the trajectory for the next turn. Additionally, the action of the aided communicator was recognized by the speaking partners and responded to accordingly. Finally, the projectability of the turn completion was provided by the syntactic features of the pointing, prosodic cues produced by the voicings of the speaking partner, and the pragmatic cues of gaze shift from the device to the speaking partner. Furthermore, turn-taking is noted with shifts in primary speakership between the participants. This interaction differed from talk-in interaction in that the turn construction unit is co-constructed through the aided communicator’s pointing and the speaking partner’s voicing of the elements that do not claim the floor, so that the author and animator are not the same person. When acting as the animator, the speaking partner used voicing, intonation, combination voicing, altered syntax, and summing up to build understanding until the aided communicator signaled turn completion by a gaze shift. Non-turn construction unit turns were noted less frequently, where the speaking participant treated the aided speaker’s pointing as a complete action by following it with a response that claimed the floor rather than a voicing.