Tegler, H., Norén, N., Demmelmaier, I., & Johansson, M. B. (2021). Mobilizing device-mediated contributions in interaction involving beginner users of eye-gaze-accessed speech-generating devices. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 5(2), 271–296. https://doi.org/10.1558/rcsi.17964
This study examined the multiple, multimodal social actions and practices that were required in order to mobilize SGD-mediated responses by two students with multiple disabilities who are beginning communicators while engaging with their occupational therapist or speech and language pathologist. The 18-year-old student had cerebral palsy and an intellectual disability and the 10-year-old had cerebral palsy and suspected developmental delay. The communication partners used a combination of gaze orientation, deictic pointing, and gestures in order to make an SGD-mediated response relevant, and if students oriented to their device, the adults treated them as pre-beginnings with small pauses, verbal encouragement and nodding. The deictic gestures served as visual attention-getting prompts, demonstrations of how to navigate within the device to reach relevant vocabulary, and demonstrations of how to use individual symbols. At the beginning of the interaction sequences the speaking partner constructed a recipient-tilted epistemic asymmetry and then shifted to using stronger deontic constructions paired with friendly prosodic features in order to mobilize an SGD-mediated response. The speaking partners used prosodic features of stress and high pitch to convey a sense of urgency, and they used a quieter volume during deontic constructions in an effort to soften the pressure. Additionally speaking partners shifted their use of linguistic resources from interrogatives and multi-unit questions to imperatives that specified an SGD-mediated response as the preferred response. In both excerpts, the student’s SGD-mediated response did not align with the preceding deontic construction, but the speaking partners treated the responses as relevant to the overall interaction.