AAC for Aphasia

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AAC for Aphasia
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Contour of a conversation

• Greetings
• Small talk
• Information sharing
• Wrap-up and farewell statements

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Communication patterns of elderly persons

• Negative image
• Slower word recall.
• More ambiguous noun usage.
• Reduced variability in production of verb tenses
  and syntactic structures.
• Smaller active vocabularies.

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• Positive perspective To attribute the age
  difference to variations in
• Social roles
• The contexts in which people live and interact.

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Communication patterns of elderly persons

• Small talk proportion
• Young adults 40
• Elderly 65-74 31
• Elderly over 75 26

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Communication patterns of elderly persons

• Storytelling proportion increases with age.
• Elderly adults tell stories
• To transfer cultural traditions.
• To instruct younger individuals.
• To establish social members with peers.

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Communication patterns of elderly persons

• Time-frame
• 65-74 over 75
• Future 13 10
• Present 48 45
• Past 39 45

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Communication patterns of elderly persons

• People and activities
• Women talk about 65-74 over 75
• Family 28 less
  
• Friends 13 more

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Communication patterns of elderly persons

• People and activities
• Elderly talk about
• Games 6
• Food 8
• Household relationships 6
• Work 5
• Family life 4

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Roles of AAC

• Replacing
• Supplementing
• Scaffolding
• Natural speech

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AAC techniques across severity range

• Lindblom (1990) model of communication mutuality
• A triangle
• The vertical axis information provided through
  speech only.
• The horizontal axis information provided from
  AAC techniques.

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AAC techniques across severity range

• Mild aphasia
• Typically rely on speech, yet experiencing anomia
  or word retrieval difficulty.
• May need a word list to read or to be read for
  cuing.

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AAC techniques across severity range

• Moderate aphasia
• AAC can support (supplement or replace) residual
  speech and enable delivery of more comprehensive
  messages.
• Using gestures
• Pointing to an item in a remnant book
• Writing words
• Drawing pictures

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AAC techniques across severity range

• Severe aphasia
• Little speech and more relying on AAC and a
  supportive partner
• Using picture or photograph books,
• Referring to maps,
• Drawing simple pictures or diagrams,
• Using physical space.

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AAC techniques across severity range

• Receptive impairment
• To help aphasic individual grasp a topic of
  conversation
• Point to pictures, maps, objects,
• Use gestures,
• Draw simple pictures or diagrams.

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Attitudes toward AAC use

• Lasker (1997)
• Three groups listened to an aphasic telling
  stories using
• Unaided natural speech,
• digitized speech output device,
• A communication notebook.

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Attitudes toward AAC use

• Most competent, most effective, most
  understandable comfortable and willing to
  interact digitized speech output.
• Least competent, least effective, least
  understandable unaided natural speech.

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Attitudes toward AAC use

• The most preferred system
• Digitized speech output 60 peers 33 SLP 37
  family.
• Natural speech 46 SLP family 43.
• The least preferred system
• Natural speech 77 peers 17 SLP family 33.

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Specific AAC techniques

• Written choice communication
• Gestures
• Remnant books
• Electronic devices
• Drawing for expression
• Partner drawing
• Communication book

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Specific AAC techniques

• Alphabet board
• Word dictionary
• Picture/photo dictionary
• Instruction card for listeners
• Rating scales
• Eye gaze