Objectives:The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of iconicity and cultural background on the recognition of social word AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) graphic symbols between two cultural groups. Methods: The participants of the study were 48 undergraduate students (24 Koreans and 24 Americans), and 20 graphic symbols of 10 social words were selected for the stimuli from PCS and Ewha-AAC symbols developed in Korea. The transparency task asked the participants to guess and write down the meanings in 30 seconds for each symbol. For the translucency task, the participants marked their degree of agreement with the meaning of the symbol on the 5-point rating scale, given 20 seconds for each slide. Results: First, the Korean students guessed the meanings of social word AAC symbols more correctly than the American students in Ewha-AAC symbols. Second, the Korean students gave higher scores to Ewha-AAC symbols, while the American students gave higher points to PCS. Third, there were moderate and positive correlations between the performances of the iconicity tasks. Conclusion: The results suggest that cultural background of words, symbols can be influencing factors for the recognition of graphic symbols. In addition, the positive correlations between the performances of the iconicity tasks suggest that transparency and translucency of graphic symbols may affect the symbol recognition. Moreover, the results suggest the need to consider the degree of transparency and translucency of graphic symbols when selecting symbols for AAC.

No abstract

No abstract

This study compared the orthographic awareness ability through fast mapping between children who are reading at a low-achieving level and normal children in the lower grades of elementary school. Methods: The participants of the study were 16 low reading achievers (LRA group) and 16 typically developing children (TD group), for a total of 32 children. To identify the orthographic awareness ability of the children, an orthographic fast-mapping (OFM) task was used. The OFM task was analyzed by using a two-way mixed ANOVA according to the group and degree of wordlikeness. A Pearson correlation coefficient was performed to identify any associations of the orthographic awareness ability and linguistic factors according to each group. Finally, to discover error type patterns from the OFM task, the error type was analyzed. Results: First, our results showed that orthographic awareness has a significant main effect of group. Also, the main effect of the degree of wordlikeness were only significant in the orthographic production task. Second, static correlation was found only in the writing abilities of the TD group. For the LRA group, static correlations appeared in all areas except for vocabulary. Third, the analysis of the error type pattern of the OFM task between groups showed a high error rate in the order of visual similarity, phonetic similarity, and mixing. Conclusion: This study was able to compare the characteristics of low reading achievers and normal children by evaluating their orthographic awareness ability belonging to metalinguistic awareness. So these findings could be used as basic data for the mediation of orthographic awareness abilities of low reading achievers.