Language learning, recasts, and interaction involving AAC: background and potential for intervention

Abstract

For children with typical development, language is learned through everyday discursive interaction. Adults mediate child participation in such interactions through the deployment of a range of co-constructive strategies, including repeating, questioning, prompting, expanding, and reformulating the child's utterances. Adult reformulations of child utterances, also known as recasts, have also been shown to relate to the acquisition of linguistic structures in children with language and learning disabilities and children and adults learning a foreign language. In this paper we discuss the theoretical basis and empirical evidence for the use of different types of recasts as a major language learning catalyst, and what may account for their facilitative effects.We consider the occurrence of different types of recasts in AAC-mediated interactions and their potential for language facilitation, within the typical operational and linguistic constraints of such interactions. We also consider the benefit of explicit and corrective forms of recasts for language facilitation in conversations with children who use AAC. We conclude by outlining future research directions.

Can Conversation-Based Intervention Using Speech-Generating Devices Improve Language in Children With Partially Intelligible Speech?

“…The findings from the current study contribute to a growing body of research examining the effects of conversation-based interventions using adult scaffolding techniques on expressive language in children provided with SGDs (Soto & Clarke, 2017;. In the current study involving children with partially intelligible speech, SGDs represent one modality of expression that may or may not be used interchangeably with children's speech.…”

“…It is proposed that conversations that involve child self-repair, in the context of scaffolding techniques including adult recasting, can also facilitate language development in children using SGDs (Clarke, Soto & Nelson 2017). While the primary aim of the intervention examined in this paper was to facilitate improvement in language, increased use of SGDs, either in isolation or combined with speech, gesture and signing, has clear potential to improve the overall communicative intelligibility of children with SPI.…”

“…A large body of intervention research has demonstrated the effectiveness of recasts in facilitating language acquisition in children developing typically and those with difficulties learning language (e.g., Camarata, Nelson, & Camarata, 1994). The use of recasts along with prompting for SGD use in child directed conversation have also proved positive in supporting enhanced language use by children and adolescents with little or no intelligible speech using SGDs (Soto & Clarke 2017;. For example, in a conversation-based intervention conducted by Soto and Clarke (2017) the participants chose from photographs of themselves in activities (e.g.…”

“…The children showed gains in grammaticalisation and use of clauses that were broadly maintained outside the intervention sessions. Soto & Clarke (2017) propose that the children using SGDs benefited from recasts delivered during motivating conversations, and from promoting of SGD use primarily because it assisted children to learn and retain the critical operational requirements (see also Clarke, Soto & Nelson, 2017).…”

Conversation-based intervention for adolescents using augmentative and alternative communication

“…Following the response, the clinician used open-ended questions to elicit further information about the meaning of that particular item in the young person’s life. Once the clinician had enough information about the participant’s communicative intention, she used recasts to reformulate the participant’s ungrammatical or incomplete utterances (Clarke, Soto, & Nelson, 2017), and used explicit instruction and verbal prompts to encourage the participant to formulate a grammatically correct version of her original utterance (i.e., to repair). When the participant was not able to find a vocabulary item on her device, the clinician added a gestural prompt (e.g., pointing to the target on the young person’s device without activating it) to support navigation.…”