Date: Friday, July 19, 3:30 pm (Warsaw time)
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Body, sequentiality and material environment in interactions of a 8-10 y/o nonspeaking boy with cerebral palsy and his orally speaking mother
Abstract
Within the field of Augmentative and Alternative Communication, major attention has been given to the role of technological interventions in the lives of people with communication disabilities, at the expense of rich embodied, situated, multimodal ways of interacting which don’t center the use of a device, but happen in place or in addition to it. In many everyday contexts, even experienced AAC users, children and adults, prefer to deploy their own speech (e.g. in case of dysarthria when a person can speak and their speech is understandable to people who know them well); ask their caregivers, friends or assistants to mediate / animate for them (Johnson 2000: 52); or use various embodied resources, often going “off device” (Kurlenkova, Satchidanand 2024; Fulcher-Rood and Higginbotham 2019; Pilesjö 2014; Buzolich, Wiemann1988; Kraat 1987). Embodied tokens, such as nods, headshakes, pointings with different parts of the body (eyes, hands, feet, full-body orientation), vocalizations, tapping, etc. are much faster to perform, which allows AAC users to keep up with temporal demands of the conversation (Fulcher-Rood and Higginbotham 2019).
For my PhD project I’ve been working with video-recorded interactions of a non-speaking boy with cerebral palsy and his Russian-speaking mother who developed their own home communication system, using an AAC device (eyetracker) along with a host of other modalities and meaning-making tools. In their conversations at home, Vlad and Alisa rely predominantly on a shared visible language based on Vlad’s gazes, vocalizations, facial expressions, and body movements. Besides this “code” or “discourse” per se, the two share a broad base of other relevant embodied knowledge and resources – the everyday world of objects, practices, space and interactional history – that serve as efficient “structures of social action”, not less important than structures of oral/aural conversation (cf. Atkinson, Heritage 1984) or assistive technologies. In my presentation, I will start laying out these structures of action which may be a helpful example of how such communicative ecologies, rather than isolated devices, can studied or even developed in interactions of children with communication disabilities.
This talk is a part of the Traincrease Lecture Series (D4.2).
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952324.
