Implications of Pragmatic and Cognitive Theories on the Design of Utterance-Based AAC Systems
Kathleen F. McCoy, Jan L. Bedrosian, Linda A. Hoag · North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics · 2010
Utterance-based AAC systems have the potential to significantly speed communication rate for someone who relies on a speech generating device for communication. At the same time, such systems pose interesting challenges including anticipating text needs, remembering what text is stored, and accessing desired text when needed. Moreover, using such systems has profound pragmatic implications as a prestored message may or may not capture exactly what the user wishes to say in a particular discourse situation. In this paper we describe a prototype of an utterance-based AAC system whose design choices are driven by findings from theoretically driven studies concerning pragmatic choices with which the user of such a system is faced. These findings are coupled with cognitive theories to make choices for system design.