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Dysphasic subjects do not have complete linguistic abilities and only produce a weakly structured, topicalized language. They are offered artificial symbolic languages to help them communicate in a way more adapted to their linguistic abilities. After a structural analysis of a corpus of utterances from children with cerebral palsy, we define a semantic lexicon for such a symbolic language. We use it as the basis of a semantic analysis process able to retrieve an interpretation of the utterances. This semantic analyser is currently used in an application designed to convert iconic languages into natural language; it might find other uses in the field of language rehabilitation.

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This article focuses on the need for technological aid for agrammatics, and presents a system designed to meet this need. The field of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) explores ways to allow people with speech or language disabilities to communicate. The use of computers and natural language processing techniques offers a range of new possibilities in this direction. Yet AAC addresses speech deficits mainly, not linguistic disabilities. A model of aided AAC interfaces with a place for natural language processing is presented. The PVI system, described in this contribution, makes use of such advanced techniques. It has been developed at Thomson-CSF for the use of children with cerebral palsy. It presents a customizable interface helping the disabled to compose sequences of icons displayed on a computer screen. A semantic parser, using lexical semantics information, is used to determine the best case assignments for predicative icons in the sequence. It maximizes a global value, the ‘semantic harmony’ of the sequence. The resulting conceptual graph is fed to a natural language generation module which uses Tree Adjoining Grammars (TAG) to generate French sentences. Evaluation by users demonstrates the system's strengths and limitations, and shows the ways for future developments.

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