Faculty of Education
School of Educational Studies
Centre for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (CAAC)
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
The main aim of this research project was to examine the difference between the accuracy levels of four year old children locating vocabulary prestored in an AAC device using a taxonomic grid organization (categories) and a schematic grid organization (theme-based). Secondary aims were to determine the children’s accuracy in performance across sessions with the taxonomic and schematic language organization techniques; whether children perform better with concrete or abstract vocabulary items and whether children are able to generalize learning to facilitate learning of new vocabulary items and to generalize learning to system use. Research findings indicated that in relation to the three secondary aims, (1) there was no statistically significant difference between the participants’ performance on the schematic grid organization and the taxonomic grid organization, although the literature indicates that category knowledge (needed to make use of the taxonomic grid organisation) only starts to develop at age 5. The children’s preschool experience might have advanced their category knowledge, thereby facilitating the learning of a taxonomic grid organization; (2) subjects were more accurate with the concrete than with the abstract vocabulary items. This might be due to the fact that AAC symbols representing abstract concepts do not reflect the way young children think about such concepts; and (3) participants were not able to generalize learning to new vocabulary words, but were able to learn to use a new system. This might reflect difficulty to learn the AAC system due to inappropriate language organisations, representations and screen layouts.
Contact person: Prof E Alant.
The aim of this research project conducted by master's student in AAC, Naomi Moolman, was to describe the ability of four year old children to recognize basic emotions as represented by graphic symbols. The secondary aims were to identify the percentage of symbols selected that were the same as the anticipated or predicted symbols representing a specific emotion and secondly, to identify features of those symbols representing frequent choices for labelling a particular emotion. Each child had to choose a symbol from an array of 16 symbols representing the four emotions, e.g. happy (4), sad (4) afraid (4) and angry (4) in response to a specific scenario representing one of these emotions. The findings indicated that the agreement between the participants' choices and the anticipated choices for each emotion was as follows: 99% agreement for happy, 85% agreement for angry, 74% agreement for afraid and 73% agreement for sad. The percentage of anticipated choices was thus highest for happy (99%) indicating that the emotion "happy" was more readily recognised in the graphic symbols. The emotions "sad" and "afraid" represented the highest frequencies of unexpected choices of symbols. The children's choices of symbols representing these emotions varied as the choices differed more from the anticipated symbols representing these emotions. "Angry" had an unexpected seven symbols identified as representing the emotion which also confirms the variation in symbol selection by the children. The analysis of the facial features of symbols most frequently chosen to represent the four emotions indicates that different components of the face play a role in recognition of different emotions. The lower component of the face (mouth) plays an important role in the recognition of happy and sad, whereas the upper component (eyes and eyebrows) plays an important role in the recognition of afraid and angry.
Contact person: Prof E Alant.
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