Construction of Graphic Symbol Utterances by Children, Teenagers, and Adults: The Effect of Structure and Task Demands

Abstract

Graphic symbol utterance construction appears to involve more than simply transferring spoken language skills. One possible explanation is that this type of task requires higher levels of metalinguistic ability. Clinical implications and directions for further research are discussed.

Teaching Graphic Symbol Combinations to Children with Limited Speech During Shared Story Reading

“…Although there is support for the influence of receptive language skills on the ability of children with and without disabilities to produce graphic symbol sequences (Sutton et al, 2010;Trudeau et al, 2007;Wilkinson, Romski, & Sevcik, 1994), the influence of this parameter on the learning process has not yet been formally determined, and future studies may be designed to investigate this relationship.…”

Early Sentence Productions of 3- and 4-Year-Old Children Who Use Augmentative and Alternative Communication

“…Examining patterns across targets also is informative, particularly because broad claims of children having difficulties creating graphic symbol sentences have been made on the basis of a limited range of targets Trudeau, Sutton, Dagenais, DeBroeck, & Morford, 2007;Trudeau et al, 2010). The most obvious pattern that emerged in the current study was the fact that nine of 10 children mastered possessor-entity during baseline.…”

Small Groups, Big Gains: Efficacy of a Tier 2 Phonological Awareness Intervention With Preschoolers With Early Literacy Deficits

“…Children using AAC tend to exhibit various grammatical difficulties. Multiple reasons for the presence of these issues have been posited in the literature (e.g., Soto, 1999;Sutton, Gallagher, Morford, & Shahnaz, 2002;Sutton, Soto, & Blockberger, 2002;Trudeau, Sutton, Dagenais, De Broeck, & Morford, 2007). The two most relevant to the current study are the modality-specific hypothesis and the translation hypothesis.…”

“…Further, the incorporation of aided modeling, contrastive targets, and systematic prompting within structured play activities that were meaningful to the children and afforded opportunities for the clinician to follow the child's lead and provide scaffolding would be expected to contribute to the effectiveness of the intervention on the basis of previous findings (e.g., Binger & Light, 2007;Binger et al, 2011;Smith & Grove, 2003). Identifying the specific content and context of the instruction implemented in the current investigation could afford significant advances in AAC intervention because previous findings have indicated that children have struggled to produce specified sentences using SGDs when structured instruction is not implemented (e.g., Trudeau et al, 2007).…”