Tracking Early Sentence-Building Progress in Graphic Symbol Communication.

Area of Science:

• Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC)
• Speech-Language Pathology
• Developmental Psychology

Background:

• Children with complex communication needs often use graphic symbols to express themselves.
• Accurate tracking of expressive language development is crucial for these children.
• Existing methods for analyzing graphic symbol use may be insufficient.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a framework for expressive English sentence development using graphic symbols.
• To introduce novel approaches for measuring and analyzing graphic symbol utterances.
• To support speech-language pathologists in monitoring language progression in AAC users.

Main Methods:

• Exploration of current challenges in measuring graphic symbol utterances.
• Presentation of a range of measures for analyzing individual and sample utterances.
• Adaptation of existing linguistic measures and development of new graphic symbol-specific analyses.

Main Results:

• Development of the Graphic Symbol Utterance and Sentence Development Framework.
• Introduction of adapted and novel measures for analyzing graphic symbol use.
• Identification of developmental patterns unique to graphic symbol productions.

Conclusions:

• A multidimensional approach is recommended for accurately tracking graphic symbol utterance growth.
• Key analyses include symbol relevance, word class diversity, and lexical diversity.
• This framework and measures support evidence-based intervention for children using graphic symbols.