Clarke, M., & Wilkinson, R. (2007). Interaction between children with cerebral palsy and their peers 1: Organizing and understanding VOCA use. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 23(4), 336–348. https://doi.org/10.1080/07434610701390350
This study examined how VOCA use emerged of two children aged 7;11 and 10;8 years with cerebral palsy when interacting with their peers without disabilities. The majority of VOCA-mediated contributions occurred following the speaking partner’s use of questions and meta-interactional prompts which required minimal to no syntactic form. The first pair parts of speaking partners in this study all required VOCA use to respond, and they used physical orientation, verbalizations and gestures to signal this expectation. The use of known answer questions was used as a type of game in one dyad and was infrequently observed in another dyad. The conversational slots created as second parts of adjacency pairs may have served to support the partner’s understanding of the VOCA-mediated turn while simultaneously providing aided speakers a context for exploiting elliptical contributions that are more quickly produced but still understood. The authors proposed that these conversational asymmetries may have served to provide a conversational framework by providing locations for VOCA use (i.e., mostly as second pair parts but also in first pair parts), in addition to providing a context for aided speaker creativity and resolution of problems in understanding VOCA-mediated utterances. Both the aided speaker and the speaking partner demonstrated a shared responsibility of interacting in a way that reflected that the conversation was using the communication aid, rather than only the aided speaker.