Environmental Factors Influencing The Transition from Using Graphic Symbols to Spelling in Communicative Interactions of Children with Speech and Motor Impairments who Use AAC
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Children with speech and motor impairments often face challenges in learning to read and write. Up to 90% of children with speech and motor impairments do not attain conventional literacy by adulthood, yet some become literate. This dissertation focuses on the transition from using graphic symbols to spelling in face-to-face communicative interactions. Understanding how environmental factors influence the transition may help us to provide appropriate opportunities and resources that foster literacy development and facilitate the use of spelling for children with speech and motor impairments. Purpose: The research was guided by the following research question: How do environmental factors influence children’s transition from using graphic symbols to becoming conventionally literate and using spelling in communicative interactions? The specific research objectives were: (1) to explore how environmental factors contribute to the transition from using graphic symbols to using spelling in communicative interactions; (2) to explain how environmental factors influence the choices of using spelling and/or graphic symbols in communicative interactions. Method: I conducted two exploratory interpretative qualitative studies: a) a retrospective study of literate adults’ childhood experiences of their transition from using graphic symbols to using spelling in communicative interactions; b) a study about the adolescents’ reasons for using either graphic symbols or spelling in communicative interactions. Overall, I completed semi-structured interviews with twenty aided communicators (adolescents and adults) as well as six caregivers. The participants included fourteen adult aided communicators (ages 18-58), six adolescents (ages 10-16), and six mothers. Ten participants who used AAC were from Canada, five from the United States, three from Poland, one from South Africa, and one from the United Kingdom. I observed 68 communication mode shifts and completed a thematic review of 120 written reflections. Findings: Two main environmental factors influenced the transition from using graphic symbols to spelling in face-to-face communicative interactions: (1) supportive people during the transition process, (2) provision of comprehensive AAC services. Supportive people provided children with reading and writing opportunities. AAC services included ongoing assessments. Conclusion: The findings highlight the importance of reading and writing opportunities, access to AAC and services, and practice of spelling in daily communicative interactions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".