Communication support through multimodal supplementation: a scoping review

Speech supplementation strategies improve spoken communication for people with motor speech disorders who experience reduced speech intelligibility. The purpose of this review was to summarize the literature on traditional supplementation strategies (e.g., alphabet supplementation, topic supplementation, and gestural supplementation) and to expand the definition of speech supplementation to include additional modalities, such as augmenting speech with pictures via mobile technology, and conversation management strategies. Results showed that studies of traditional supplementation consistently reported positive outcomes, including increased intelligibility, decreased speech rate, and positive attitudes toward speakers. New modalities, such as supplementing speech through digital photos, may come to be integrated with traditional approaches, given the proliferation of digital photography and mobile tablet technologies. In addition, new research is exploring the role of communication partners in dyads where one speaker has dysarthria, as well as strategies that communication partners employ to understand dysarthric speech.