AAC users' discourse in the workplace

A number of attempts have been made to capture the discourse of AAC users (Beukelman, et al. 1984; Vertanen & Kristensson, 2011) but only one corpus exists that explicitly focusses on the language of AAC users and non-AAC users in the workplace. In this chapter, we will discuss the work that has been done to describe AAC users’ discourse and research conducted using the AAC and non-AAC workplace corpus (ANAWC) (Pickering & Bruce, 2009). This work has shown that AAC users often prefer to vocalize instead of using their devices in interaction in order to inhabit the same “time stream” as their interlocutors (Bouchard, 2016; Friginal, Pickering & Bruce, 2016). We expand this work and compare the speech produced by AAC users while using their devices and when vocalizing. The data from the ANAWC are separated in two sub corpora: one that includes all the vocalizations made by the AAC users, and one that includes all the speech produced using their devices. These sub corpora are analyzed quantitatively, looking at word frequency and word clusters, and qualitatively, focusing on the situations when the speakers vocalize or use their devices. This advances our understanding of the discourse of AAC users in the workplace in a way that would not be possible without the use of corpora.