Linguistic characteristics of AAC discourse in the workplace

Abstract

This study examines linguistic co-occurrence patterns in the discourse of individuals with communication impairments who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices in the workplace by comparing them to those of non-AAC users in similar job settings. A typical workweek (≈ 40 hours) per focal participant (four AAC; four non-AAC) was recorded and transcribed to create a specialized corpus of workplace discourse of approximately 464,000 words at the time of this analysis. A multidimensional analysis of co-occurrence patterns along functional linguistic dimensions, following Biber (1988, 1995) [ Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], reveals differences in the macro discourse characteristics of AAC vis-a-vis non-AAC texts. Results indicate that AAC texts make use of more informational, non-narrative, and explicit textual features of discourse than their non-AAC counterparts. Implications to improve the capabilities of AAC devices to produce speech that matches baseline expectations of co-workers in the workplace are discussed.

Linguistic variation in the discourse of corporate annual reports: A multi-dimensional analysis

“…MD analysis has been applied to analyze business registers, such as business letters (Kessapidu, 1997), advertising (Koteyko, 2015), workplace discourse (Friginal et al., 2013) and some more controlled sub-registers, like discourse of outsourced call centers (Friginal, 2008). Most of these studies not only identified the co-occurrence patterns of linguistic features, but also qualitatively interpreted the communicative strategies and business factors indexed by those linguistic patterns.…”

A concept-environment for computer-based augmentative and alternative communication founded on a systematic review

“…Paper Category (Bermúdez et al, 2010), (Cabrera et al, 2008), (Chin et al, 2010), (Deepa et al, 2010), (Okasaka and Hoshino, 2012), (Schalk et al, 2008), (Sorger et al, 2009), (Sun et al, 2010, (Thomas et al, 2008), (Thompson et al, 2013), (Ortner et al, 2011), (Al-Abdullatif et al, 2013), , , (Ming et al, 2009) BCI (Hanson et al, 2010) Speech generator device (Keegan et al, 2009) EOG (Joubert et al, 2011) Exploratory study (Ann and Theng, 2011b) Facial expression (Park et al, 2012), (Cipresso et al, 2011) Eyetracking (AlJa 'am et al, 2008), (Ann and Theng, 2011b), (Friginal et al, 2013), , (Sorna et al, 2009), (Hsieh et al, 2009) Software modeling , , , (Silva and Pereira, 2011), (Tsai, 2013) Communication board (Belani, 2012), (Arnott and Alm, 2013), (Deepa et al, 2010), (Hill, 2010), (McCoy et al, 2013), (Mak and Wolpaw, 2009), Conceptual review (Alwell and Cobb, 2009), (Finke et al, 2008) Systematic review , (Prabhu and Prasad, 2011), Alternative virtual keyboard…”

Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact

“…In order to pursue further NLP applications for AAC, there is a need to collect or aggregate representative training data sets for these models. The most comprehensive dataset including conversational data for AAC communicators is the AAC and non-AAC Workplace Corpus (Friginal et al, 2013). This corpus includes transcripts of over two hundred hours of data captured with eight participants using AAC devices in their workplace environment.…”