The present study investigated the effects of different types of recasts and prompts on the rate of repair and spontaneous use of novel vocabulary by eight children with severe motor speech disabilities who used speech-generating technologies to communicate. Data came from 60 transcripts of clinical sessions that were part of a conversation-based intervention designed to teach them pronouns, verbs, and verb inflections. The results showed that, when presented alone, interrogative choice and declarative recasts led to the highest rates of child repair. The results also showed that when children were presented with recasts and prompts to repair, the rate of repair increased. Spontaneous use of linguistic targets was significantly and positively related to conversational sequences where the adult recast was followed by child repair. These findings suggest that using different recast types and prompts to repair may be beneficial for spontaneous use of linguistic targets in this population.

The use of early verbal categories, their event types, and the emergence of verbal inflections (-ing, -s, and -ed) were analyzed in data from four participants with motor speech disorders aged 9;5-13;9 (years;months) who used speech-generating devices to converse with a familiar adult. The study was conducted through a secondary analysis of a corpus of data collected as part of another study. It documents the production of verbs and the emergence of verb inflections in natural conversations between each of the participants and a member of their educational team over a period of up to 10 months. All participants used both action and state verbs, although action verbs were dominant. The emergence of the inflections -ing, -s, and -ed varied and were distributed selectively with different verb categories and event types. The results are discussed in terms of language development and are considered in terms of the findings from research with children without disabilities, which suggest that action verbs precede state verbs, and inflections are primarily acquired based on their correspondence to the verbal category (action-state). Implications for theory, practice, and further research are discussed.

This paper exemplifies the process we used to customize the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) software to monitor a wide range of language measures for children who use high-tech speech-generating devices (SGDs) when taking into consideration two main characteristics of aided communication: multimodality and co-constructed interaction structure. General considerations relevant to Language Sampling and Analysis (LSA) and examples of their applications are described in conversations between young aided speakers (child) and natural speakers (adult) and include the following stages: (a) eliciting and videotaping a representative sample of the child's language; (b) transcribing verbatim the language sample according to SALT conventions and modifications; and (c) analyzing the language sample with the common SALT commands and new variables (codes) measures. Our findings suggest that SALT software can be easily adapted and used as a tool for augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) evidence-based practice.

This study aimed to detect patterns in clause construction structural changes produced by four participants aged 9;5 to 13;7 (years;months) with motor speech disorders who use speechgenerating devices. Sequences of adult-child interactions, drawn from the data of a larger study focused on enhancing vocabulary and grammar skills (Soto & Clarke, 2017), were examined. This current study comprises a secondary analysis of a corpus of 29 conversations totaling 808.36 min, analyzing clause structures by type, linguistic complexity, and intensity of adult prompts (number of turns). Results show that, over time, the participants' clause structure complexity increased through addition of phrase-internal elements such as inflections, articles, and prepositions. Use of specific grammatical elements followed the developmental stages observed in children with typical development (Brown, 1973). For all participants, the personal pronoun I (first-person singular) emerged before she, he (third-person singular), and we or they (plural). Participants with the highest number of adult-child co-constructed clauses also had the highest number of well-formed clauses. The intensity of adult prompts increased as clause structures became more complex and as participants needed more support. Implications for practice and theory are discussed.