Professor Martine Smith

Summary

This is an international cross-linguistic project across 19 sites, coordinated by the University of Oslo, focusing on the language and communication development of children with severe speech and physical impairments who rely on graphic symbols and/or electronic communication devices to communicate. The research seeks to explore the interrelationships between receptive and expressive communication skills across spoken and graphic modalities, in children aged 5-15 years. Children acquiring language using graphic symbols typically are exposed primarily to speech as the primary mode of communication, but rely primarily on graphic symbols for their own expressive communication. The impact of this modality asymmetry is poorly understood. Most of these children have little access to role models who are expert in their own communication systems and many may be more expert in the use of their graphic symbols than the adults who are expected to support their communication development. The international collaboration with this project creates the potential for exploring the solutions to this unusual communication situation that are created by a uniquely large cohort of participants.

Summary

Children communicating using graphic symbols typically produce expressive output that is limited in terms of syntactic complexity and frequently different in terms of structural features relative to an expected spoken utterance. It is not clear whether these features reflect (1) underlying language difficulties that are manifested in both graphic and spoken modalities, with only the graphic modality available for inspection; (2) strategic accommodation to the time demands of aided communication; or (3) modality specific adaptations. One of the more productive avenues for exploring the value of each of these candidate explanations is the involvement of typically developing children, who have the potential to generate output both in graphic symbols and in speech. This research project explores the impact of varying sentence constructions on (1) the interpretation and (2) the generation of descriptions of events across spoken and graphic symbol contexts in typically developing children aged 5-7 years.

Funding Agency

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Summary

Assessing the working memory skills of children with severe speech and physical impairments is challenging, because of the contraints in terms of motor response accessible. The most commonly used tool is an adapted version of the digit span task, with number displays presented visually so that participants can select digits from the display. The goal of this project is to develop and validate accessible symbol- and text-based working memory tasks, initially with typically developing children and subsequently with children with severe speech and physical impairments. The research involves collaboration with the University of La Coruna and Manchester Metropolitan University.