Study on Language Production in Children with Cerebral Palsy Augmentative and Alternative Communication Users

Children users of Augmentative and Alternative Communication Systems (aacs) suffer from significant impairments in complex language production, in the construction of personal or fictional narratives. The socio-constructivist approach to development has supported the view that narratives are crucial for the construction of personal and social identity (Booting, 2002; Bruner, 2004). The present case study analyzes the linguistic production in three children with cerebral palsy users of aacs during shared reading sharing. Three main aspects of interactions are analyzed: (a) the characteristics of language produced by children, including grammatical and semantic complexity and lexical type, (b) the strategies used by teachers to encourage narrative production, and (c) how aacs are used to boost linguistic production. Our findings illustrate the difficulties faced by these children. In the three cases, linguistic production is restricted to extremely simple sentences (of one word in most cases) and a lack of children's initiative is observed during an interaction. The results points toward the need of developing a better implementation of bootstrapping technics for narrative elicitation, taking into account the intrinsic limitations of aacs.