Using the concepts and principles of conversation analysis (CA), this paper examines the everyday unscripted spontaneous conversations between 4 boys who communicate with the aid of a speech-generating device (SGD), and their mothers. The analyses focused on describing the conversationalists' various actions in aided turn-transition processes resulting in a 33-part turntransition structure used to accomplish aided turn initiation. Despite the challenges to conversational progress, the participants did not consider the slow conversational speed a challenge. Both the mothers and their children were orientated to progression of the aided conversation by creating interaction practices to achieve successful turn-transitions. By understanding the structural characteristics of fluent aided conversations, it may be possible to develop communication strategies and device features that promote fluent interactions.

This study describes the multiple coconstruction process of aided utterances that ocuur when nonspeaking people use a communication book in their everyday conversations. Previous studies have shown that coconstruction is present both in the progress of pointing-voicing pairs and in the negotiation of meanings. Adopting the concepts and the tools of multimodal conversation analysis, this study demonstrates how two non-speaking boys and their speech and language therapists utilized simultaneously six interactional resources that were interwoven in different multimodal practices during their coconstruction of aided utterances. The observations elicited by microanalysis provide an insight into the temporal, co-operative and progressive nature of conversations that are coconstructed with a communication book. The findings of this study are helpful for professionals in assessing and scaffolding aided communicators during their conversations with their significant communicative partners.

Aided communicators often have an opportunity to express themselves with speech-generating devices (SGDs) that produce symbol by symbol (SBS) and/or pre-stored (PS) utterances. Studies on the usage of PS utterances report that these utterances affect conversations positively, but it appears that aided communicators and professionals may have divergent views on their benefits. The aim of this study is to analyse how school-aged aided communicators, their mothers, peers, and speech and language therapists (SLTs) co-construct the social actions of PS utterances during their everyday interactions. The theoretical framework of this study is conversation analysis. This approach to analysing the data enhances our understanding of the linguistic and temporal resources of PS utterances and how they are used to reinforce various rich social actions that promote the progress of aided conversations to resemble natural spoken conversations. The results of this study will help SLTs and teachers in their planning content for SGDs as well as in teaching, and guiding aided communicators and their partners to utilize PS utterances in combination with SBS utterances during their conversations.

No abstract