Small Object of Desire: The Monteverde Invincia Stylus fountain pen – and Keyword Vocabulary

Those who follow the Speech Dudes on Twitter (@speechdudes) may recall a mysterious tweet from December 28th, 2012, that referred to something called the Monteverde Invincia fountain pen.

And those who are regular readers of this blog may vaguely recall that one of the Dudes has a passion for pens that marks him out as being either very old-fashioned, slightly quirky, or perhaps requiring of medication. But the Invincia is a pen of such style, charm, and delicious darkness that I’m guessing at least one of you out there will be ponying up the $75 just to get one of these wonderful objects of desire in your hand. Literally.

Monteverde Invincia Stylus

But first, because this is, after all, a blog written by SLP’s for other SLP’s, educators, language lovers, and all moms and dads with a curious bent, let’s talk a little bit about vocabulary.

In the field of augmentative and alternative communication, where the Dudes earn their daily crusts, it’s common to talk about words as being either core or fringe. Actually, up until five years ago, it wasn’t always that common but the proliferation of apps for tablets has seen the words core and fringe become almost essential to the marketing blurb of any of these apps – whether or not it’s true. Just tossing the words out doesn’t make an app a good communication tool, nor does copying what other folks have done and dropping it into a few pages make it any better. No, app creators need to learn what the words really mean before using them as sales jargon [1].

But if you are serious about creating a word-based solution, you can use the following definitions to help you in your quest:

Core Word: A word with a high frequency-of-use value that is also what you might expect to see statistically when you compare it to a large reference corpus.

Fringe Word: A word with a low frequency-of-use value that is also what you might expect to see statistically when you compare it to a large reference corpus.

Keyword: A word that has a higher frequency-of-use than what you might statistically expect when you compare it to a large reference corpus.

You’ll notice that I have purposely defined these as statistical phenomena and not as actual words that may be referred to as “useful,” “necessary,” “essential,” “uncommon,” or any other such subjectively nuanced adjectives. You’ve hopefully also picked up on the notion that there needs to be a “reference corpus” of some sort. The best reference corpus I suggest is one I like to call “the English language” because that is the thing that we all need to use in order to communicate with one another. So using the Corpus of Contemporary American or the British National Corpus is fair game. And when it comes to core vocabulary, you’ll find that even if you look at the small vocabulary lists that have been collected in the AAC field from different age group across different situations, you’ll find the same words are common to all [2].

If you’re already working in AAC, you may not be familiar with the use of the term keyword but it’s taken from the world of Corpus Linguistics and I find it a very useful concept to apply. For example, in the world of education, when folks talk about “core words” in relation to Core Communication Standards, they are really talking about keywords; the word vertex is a “core word” in math but is a keyword from an AAC perspective.

Keywords are words which are significantly more frequent in a sample of text than would be expected, given their frequency in a large general reference corpus. (Stubbs, 2010) [3]

So, let’s go back to my encomium [4] on the Monteverde Invicia Stylus pen and see what we can learn about core words, fringe words, and keywords.

The first thing is that the world of pens and paper has specialized vocabulary – or more specifically uses some words in specialized ways. This would be keyword vocabulary within the domain of “Fine Writing.” Thus, the word nib is statistically a fringe word when compared to a general vocabulary but becomes a keyword within the context of discussing fountain pens. In essence, keywords are typically domain-specific items and a sub-set of fringe.

To give you a feel for what keywords you might find, I did a quick(ish) analysis based on a 10,000 word corpus created from a popular blog about fountain pens and their use. Using WordSmith 6 software, I created a word list based on the text from the blog, then used the KeyWord facility to determine the top 2o keywords in the sample i.e. those words that were being used statistically more than you might expect when compared with a standard reference (and in this case, my standard reference is the British National Corpus).

The following “league table” illustrated keyword vocabulary in the domain of Fine Writing.

Keywords “Fine Writing”

The words fountain and pen appear separately but when you look at the concordance data, the two actually appear typically as fountain pen, so I wouldn’t regard fountain itself a keyword – the keyword is the compound noun, fountain pen.  If I’d taken a few more minutes, I could have put the singular and plural forms together so we wouldn’t see separate entries for pen(s), ink(s), cartridge(s), converter(s), and color(s).

Knowing about such keyword vocabulary is, in fact, very useful. My enthusiasm for my new pen can be explained to you much more succinctly if I can use the keywords. For example, I recommend that if you want one of these pens, you are better off with the medium-sized nib because that will spread the ink out to facilitate clearly writing. Furthermore, since one of the great features of the pen is that it includes both a cartridge and a converter, knowing the words cartridge and converter is helpful! If I then explain that a converter is a small barrel that you can use to suck up ink from an ink bottle, you now know that by buying different inks you can choose which ink colors you’d like to have.

Vocabulary lesson aside, the pen is indeed a stylish addition to anyone’s fashion accessories. Its brushed metal, matt-black finish and fine ribbing give it a distinctive appearance with a hi-tech accent. Its darkness is reinforced by having a shiny black stainless-steel nib, which makes it look like the sort of pen Darth Vader might have used to sign the order authorizing the construction of the Death Star (“You don’t know the power of the Dark Side!”) or that Batman has somewhere on his utility belt (“Quick Robin, use the BatPen!”)

Pen showing internal converter

It writes smoothly and has the merest hint of a squeak as it glides across paper, which is not a bad thing in the world of fountain pens. It’s classed as a heavy pen (1.4 oz. or 4.0 grams) and so has a much more solid feel than some cheap, plastic ballpoint.

Even the nib is black!

To boost its hi-tech credentials even more, the cap is tipped with conductive rubber so it can be used with a capacitive touchscreen; in short, you can write on your favorite tablet device! I’ve tested it with the Galaxy Tab 7″ display, the 10″ display model (my favorite), the iPad 3 ,  a Motorola Droid 3, Microsoft Surface, and all have worked just fine.

Conductive rubber tip

There is a white version of the pen available but that doesn’t appeal to me. It’s the blackness that makes it sharp! And with a retail price of $95, it may sound steep to those who are new to the world of fountain pens. But you can get it from Amazon for $75, and other Internet sources are quoting $65, so there are deals to be had.

Long term, there are lots of different inks to choose from. Monteverde offer a range of inks but you should check out Glenn’s Pens where there is a good article on Fountain Pen Ink along with a dizzying array of brands and color options [5]. Another great resource is The Goulet Pen Company, where you’ll also find videos related to pens and paper.

Oh, and it you do buy the pen, drop us a note – then we know who we won’t be able to impress by whipping out our Invicia’s!

Notes
[1] And while we’re at it, there is a special place in the nine circles of Hell (possibly the 8th) reserved for anyone who claims their app is “intuitive,” “ground-breaking,” or, heaven forbid, “game changing.” If it takes me fifteen minutes and four or five keystrokes to find a word like already, and if there is no way for me to actually find it other than hitting key after key after key until  I stumble across it, you have NO right to talk about “intuitive,” “ground breaking,” or “game changing” – unless the “change” in question is to set AAC back 10 years by providing sub-par sops that do nothing more than provide a 10-minute solution that then requires hours and hours of fiddling to add all the stuff that was missing in the first place.

Just sayin’…

[2] If you want a list of a many vocabulary sources, there’s one available via this Dude Link! 

[3] Stubbs, M. (2010). Three concepts of keywords. In M. Bondi and M. Scott (Eds.) Keyness in Texts: Studies in Corpus Linguistics. John Benjamins Publishing: Philadelphia. Available via this Dude Link 

[4] Here’s one of those wonderful words that deserves to be taken out of the box now and again, dusted down, polished up, and tossed into a sentence just to brighten up an otherwise lexically turgid day. The OED defines encomium as “a high-flown expression of praise.” It come, via Latin, from the Greek enkomion (ἐγκώμιον) and ultimately eulogia (εὐλογία) or “eulogy,” which means “praise.” And yes, the logia element does mean “speaking” and is the same root as logos meaning “word.” Only the Dudes would bring you Classical Greek and make it interesting!

[5] My favorite ink at the moment is made by Diamine and called “Syrah,” a splendid dark-red that looks particularly fetching against the ivory paper of my Quo Vadis Havana journal. I use it in my Cross Torero Bourdeaux Croc, which is a broad-nibbed red colored pen that lives in my travel bag.

The Dudes Do ASHA 2012: Day 4 11/17/12

It was the last day of ASHA and I had the special honor of closing the AAC strand for the convention. In short, I was last on the list of AAC presenters. In a curious twist of fate, my colleague from Germany opened the AAC strand at the first session of Thursday so between us we’d bracketed the field!

ASHA at GWCC

A less charitable viewpoint might be that I had to present after lunch on the last day, when many folks were leaving to catch planes home or taking the opportunity to spend one last day in the wonderful city of Atlanta. So the fact that folks turned up, including one of my #slpeeps from the Twitterverse was quite a relief. [2]

The topic was on how to use the data generated by an AAC device to plan therapy sessions. A number of AAC technologies have the facility to track data but few people seem to use it. The purpose of the presentation was to show folks that there is immense value in using such logging in order to help clients improve their communication skills.

Basically, automated data logging tracks events over time; you can see what someone is saying and when they are saying it. And with just these two pieces of information, you can provide a much better service to your clients. [1] You can gather information about;

• Vocabulary – the words your client uses
• Morphology – the way your client uses morphemes to indicate tense, number, intensity etc.
• Syntax – how your client uses words in a systemic way along with other words
• Function – how is your client’s language used (questions, imperatives, requests etc.)

To facilitate this, you can use the QUAD Profile, a paper-based checklist that provides guidelines on what to look for. Developed in 2005 as a quick and dirty evaluation tool, the QUAD is simple enough that you don’t have to be a specialist in AAC to use it [3]. You can click on the graphic below to download a copy.

QUAD Profile

You can also take user-generated text data and analyze it using either Concordance or WordSmith, two pieces of software that you can input large amounts of text and then measure word frequencies, type/token ratios, or find keywords – those words in a sample that occur more frequently than you would expect by chance. I’ve covered both these – and discussed core versus fringe versus keywords in The Dudes Do ISAAC 2012: Day 4 – Of Corpora and Concordances, so take a look there for more details.

What I failed to spend any time talking about was the excellent BYU Corpora created by Mark Davies at Brigham Young University. If you’re wanting to find out how a particular word is used in contemporary American English – or slightly less contemporary British English – you can do no worse than using these corpora than the Corpus of Contemporary American English, or COCA [4]. As an example, I previously talked about the difference between “taking a bath/shower” and “having a bath/shower,” arguing that in British English you’d teach “having” whereas in American English you’d focus on “taking.” The key point is that you can use the COCA to quantify this difference. And quantifying is a step towards evidence-based practice.

Here’s another example of where using the COCA can help you decide on which words to teach: which should you teach first – look or see? Well, if you want to focus on bigger semantic bang-for-buck, you should go for see, which is used in speech twice as often as look. Or how about need and want? It turns out that want is three times more likely to be used than need, so want is much more useful.

Another thing the COCA does is to show how words are used in context. This turns out to be very valuable knowledge to have when teaching language because you can’t just teach a word in isolation. For example, if we go back to the example of the word look, the COCA shows that is very frequently appears immediately before a preposition. Here are specifics:

“look” and PREP

So if you are going to teach look, think about look at followed by look for as contextual phrases because that’s how the word is used in real life! Here’s a link to download my slides and notes as a PDF handout.

DOWNLOAD: Using AAC device-generated client data to develop therapy sessions

By 2:30, I was done. My target was to be in my room at 3:00 with my shoes off, feet up, and a coffee in my hand. And this turned out to be a success!

At 5:00, I left for an early dinner with friend at the Sweet Georgia’s Juke Joint at 200 Peachtree Street. Being in the South, I plumped for fried chicken with collard greens, a peach cobbler for dessert, and a delicious Millionaires Mojito. To make the night breeze along, we were entertained by Nat George and the Nat George Players, a band so smooth you could spread ‘em on toast.

The video doesn’t really do the band justice but that’s all the more reason for you to put a trip to see them on your list of “Things to do in Atlanta” on you next trip out.

Another memorable night, and yet another example of why I guess I could spend much more time exploring the city. But tomorrow it’s back home. Ah well. C’est la vie.

Downtown Atlanta

Notes
[1] At this point, you might wonder why I don’t leap into the discussion about privacy, security, and ethics. Well, that’s because if I need to do that, I’d rather spend an entire post on it. But the short answer is that in all the years I’ve worked with clients who have data logging capabilities I have yet to have ONE tell me that I can’t see their data. After I have a short conversation about why I want to track their data and what I intend to do with it, they’ve been happy to allow me to have access. It’s important to have this discussion prior to turning on monitoring, and critical to explain the value, but once you do that, there’s no problem. Informed consent is a wonderful thing.

[2] OK, so it was @MeganPanatier – Thanks for stopping by and for tweeting some of my comments during the presentation!

[3] Cross, R.T. (2010). Developing Evidence-Based Clinical Resources, in Embedding Evidence-Based Practice in Speech and Language Therapy: International Examples (eds H. Roddam and J. Skeat), John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Chichester, UK.

[4] The site  includes the Corpus of Contemporary American English (450 million words), the British National Corpus (100 million words), the Corpus of Historical American (400 million words), the Time Magazine corpus (100 million words) and the new Corpus of American Soap Operas (100 million words), which I have yet to test run!

The Dudes Do ISAAC 2012: Day 5 – Of Language and Linguists

I’ve been an SLP for almost 30 years but my first degree is  in Psychology and Linguistics. I fully intended to become a Psychologist [1] but strayed from the path and ended up in Speech Therapy. Needless to say, my fascination with our profession has always been viewed through a linguistics lens and regular readers will already have detected that. In fact, one of the luminaries of AAC, Sarah Blackstone, for many years believed I was a linguist and not an SLP, and I have been introduced as a linguist at more than one conference.

This is probably why I still like to hang out with real linguists, who are much smarter than I and from whom I continue to learn lots of new stuff. So it’s no surprise that I went along to Wednesday afternooon session entitled Natural Language processing and AAC: Current advances at the interface between technology and communication.

NLP

 The presenters were more like a panel, bringing different perspectives on how the application of NLP could help the development of AAC [2]. NLP is a cross-over field of linguistics, artificial intelligence, and computer science that deals with analyzing, understanding and generating the languages that humans use naturally in order to interface with computers in both written and spoken contexts using natural human languages instead of computer languages. The main professional body that exemplifies the scope of NLP is the Association of Computational Linguistics, which publishes the journal, Computational Linguistics, on a quarterly basis. With the latest edition including articles with titles such as A Context-Theoretic Framework for Compositionality in Distributional Semantics, and Learning Entailment Relations by Global Graph Structure Optimization, it’s not a field that SLPs are falling over themselves to join. It’s also not a journal I read regularly but then there are so many journals out there it’s impossible to keep track.

SLPAT logo

The folks were also there to promote awareness of a new special interest group called the SIG for Speech and Language Processing in Assistive Technologies, or SLPAT for short. And yes, if you misread it as “splat,” you’re OK because its members also affectionately call it “splat” as well [3].

For those who wonder what Natural Language Processing might offer to AAC, it’s worth bearing in mind that NLP is already being used in a number of areas that we use daily. If you’ve ever used a web-based translation system to read foreign text, then you’ve made use of NLP. If you’ve ever used a speech recognition system such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking or Microsoft Sync in your car, then you’ve benefited from NLP. And if you’ve scanned a document and had a piece of software convert it to text, you’re seeing NLP in action.

In relation to AAC, a number of research initiatives are already underway. Jeff Higginbotham from the University of New York at Buffalo is working on a “just-in-time” message system that will work with AAC devices to provide web-sourced topic-based content using internet (and intranet) natural language processing techniques. Annalu Waller from the University of Dundee is working on prediction-based phonemic AAC systems  (the PhonicStick®) where NLP algorithms are used to determine which sounds are most likely to follow others. Karl Wiegard and Rupal Patel have been investigating non-syntactic word prediction to create systems that can correct user-generated utterences that have flawed syntax. And at the Health and Science University in Portland, Oregon, Melanie Fried-Oken and her colleagues are working with brain-controlled interfaces and spelling systems, the operation of which can be optimized by using special NLP-based software to improve accuracy and speed of selection.

All of these are currently still in the research phase so you needn’t be asking how much you’ll need to buy one, but it’s research like this that will ultimately lead to products, even if 90% of university projects simply end up as articles in journals or a paper that ends with the immortal lines “much more research is needed.”

And if you’re looking for questions, quite a few turned up at the session, most coming from Melanie Fried-Oken who, as a clinician, really wants to see some practical, hands-on solutions. Here are some – of several –  that interested me;

• Can NLP help us design systems that can adapt to the actual language used by an individual with an AAC device, and maybe even reconfigure the device as a result of this?
• Can NLP help in the tracking of the vocabulary, representation, and navigation elements of an AAC system?
• Can NLP help design systems that identify and end-user’s language level?

These resonate because they are the very same questions my collegues and I have been asking for a couple of years now, and have been slowly working towards. In the field of AAC in general, the notion of automatic data logging is not new and has been available for some time on a number of AAC devices. The fun bit is deciding where next to go with this, and how best to leverage the current data collection methodologies. As soon as there’s something to present to the world, we’ll be happy to share!

Meanwhile, for those interested in finding out more on SIG SLPAT, or even if you want to join, you can go to their web site at www.slpat.org and read about the aims of the group [4]. There’s a special edition of the Computer Speech and Language journal out before the end of the year that will be about NLP and Assistive Technology, and the next SIG-SLPAT conference will be in 2013 in France – somewhere. There will be a call for papers later in the year so get your NLP thinking caps on and dust off that passport…

Notes
[1] Just a few weeks before I left for University, a friend of my sister was talking to my local newsagent about my moving and asked what I was going to study. Apparently she told him I was studying to be a psychopath. I sometimes wonder how un-wrong she may have been…

[2] The presenters were Kathy McCoy, University of Delaware; Annalu Waller and Alan McGregor, University of Dundee; and Melanie Fried-Oken and Brian Rourk, Oregon Health & Science University. I apologise if I missed someone.

[3] It’s pretty well impossible not to read SLPAT as “splat,” in the same way that fashion store French Connection: UK used the acronym FCUK on all their advertising, knowing full well that folks word read it otherwise! The company voluntarily stopped using the acronym in 2005, but not before stores such as Bloomingdales refused to handle FCUK branded items.

[4] I did see what would happen if I made an error and typed “splat.org” instead of “slpat.org” and found myself at a rather boring “parking site” with links to paintball activities. More fascinating was the “splat.com,” which took me to the home of the Sizzling Platter restaurant group, whose products include Little Caesars Pizza, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Sizzler Steak House.

The Dudes Do ISAAC 2012: Day 4 – Of Corpora and Concordances

Pittsburgh from Station Square

Marketing applies as much to conference presentations as it does to selling beans. Or coffee. Or bagels[1]. Picking a good title is more important than the presentation itself. Really, it is. Which explains why my “first-thing-in-the-morning” session was not exactly standing room only. The presentation title was the technically accurate but marketingly disasterous Using Concordance Software and online Corpora in AAC. A much better title would have been Using Velcro and a Free iPad for New Simple Gamechanging Therapy. You see, this has all the buzz words that people scan for when reading a conference program. Free is always a winner; iPad is currently sexy; new suggests you will be surprised and maybe first to do something in your part of the world; Velcro® is something ALL therapists relate to; and game-changer is an over-used, over-hyped, almost meaningless vogue word that can be applied to anything in order to make it sound impressive. People who use the word “game-changer” should be hung, drawn, quartered, and made to read a thesaurus.

But I did, fortunately, hear from a number of folks who told me they wanted to come to the presentation but it clashed with another. It clashed, in fact, with several! So given a finite number of potential attendees divided by the number of sessions, as concurrency goes up, individual session attendence goes down. Therefore for those who were unable to attend, I can at least give you a brief summary of what I was talking about. And for those folks who couldn’t make it to ISAAC 2012 in the first place, I’m also including this link to my PowerPoint files and Resources List via the Dudes’ Dropbox account.

The first thing I covered was the difference between core, fringe, and keyword vocabulary. In AAC, the use of core and fringe is now fairly common but we need to make another distinction for something called keyword vocabulary. Here’s how these three words can be defined:

• Core word: A word that has a high frequency of use value that is statistically expected when compared to a large reference corpus.

• Fringe word: A word that has a low frequency of use value that is statistically expected when compared to a large reference corpus.

• Keyword: A word that has a higher frequency of use which is significantly more frequent than expected when compared to a large reference corpus.

Notice that these definitions do not include any notion of “importance.” A common mistake is for people to say things like, “but Tommy loves Transformers so ‘Optimus Prime’ is an important core word for him.” No, “Optimus Prime” is a keyword for him. It may seem like a trivial distinction but it is useful.  Sure, it may be an “important” word for him” but that still does not make it core. Thus, when people talk about a “personal core” for an individual, they are really talking about a person’s keyword set. It is much better to use this because talking about a “personal core” seems to me to be confusing and changes the definition of core.

The notion of keywords has been taken straight from the field of Corpus Linguistics:

Keywords are words which are significantly more frequent in a sample of text than would be expected, given their frequency in a large general reference corpus. (Stubbs, 2010) [2]

Corpus Linguistics uses large data samples, or corpora, to look for patterns in language. The larger the samples are, the more reflective the data is of “real world” language use. One of the largest online sets of such corpora is those developed and maintained by Mark Davies at Brigham Young University in Utah. The Corpus of Contemporary American English [3] is based on a sample of 425 million words, and can provide frequency data of individual items, as well as contextual information on how these are typically used. This type of data can be useful for the AAC practitioner in determiner which words to include in a system and to answer questions about how a word may be used (e.g. is the work light used more as a noun than a verb?)

Another tool used by corpus linguists is concordance software. Such software allows investigators to input text and create output in the form of frequency lists, key word lists, and key words in context. The AAC practitioner can use client-generated data and run it through concordance software to build personal vocabulary lists. It’s also possible to compare a client’s data with other samples, which can also be very instructive for a clinician who wants to see how an individual’s use of language matches with a “standard.”

Concordance

Concordance is a flexible text analysis program which lets you gain better insight into e-texts and analyze language objectively and in depth. It lets you count words, make word lists, word frequency lists, and indexes.

You can select and sort words in many ways, search for phrases, do proximity searches, sample words, and do regular expression searches. You can also see statistics on your text, including word types, tokens, and percentages, type/token ratios, character and sentence counts and a word length chart.

WordSmith is a popular word-analysis software that includes features to generate word lists, frequency lists, usage lists, and keyword lists.

It also has the option to download the British National Corpus word frequency list to use as a large comparative data set. This is a great tool for investigating keywords among small data sets.

Now, a number of commercial devices have this data-logging feature included as an option, providing a record of events over time. With the client’s consent, being able to track such usage can be invaluable in helping clinicians and educators see exactly what the client is currently capable of doing and, by extension, create teaching plans that will develop their ability to use the device. But if you are prepared to clean the raw data from an AAC device up a little, you can drop it into a concordance software and works some magic. You can see how a client’s use of vocabulary matches what you might expect; you can discover a clients keyword vocabulary by filtering out core words; and you can look at how client’s use vocabulary in context e.g. where do they use the word light and how is it being used.

In summary, what I’m suggesting is that using (a) large online corpora and (b) concordance software can enhance the way on which we develop and expand AAC systems, and that both of these are based on actual usage of language and not some hypothetical construct of what we think is happening with vocabulary.

Enough of the academic stuff; I just want to alert you to an unmissable experience at Tonic Bar & Grill on the corner at 971 Liberty Avenue, just outside the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. Those of a nervous gastronomic disposition may want to stop reading now – as may folks who are on any diet other than the “Let’s See How Fat I Can Get Before My Arteries Explode” diet.

At any time of day, you should prop yourself up at the bar, order one of their small selection of draught beers, and place an order for Poutine Fries [4]. This is a heavenly bowl of hot potato fries, smoothered in slippery, creamy cheese, and topped with a generous helping of tender braised short ribs. You can choose to experience this ambrosial feast either by eating it or having a cardiologist smear it directly on to your arteries: we recommend the former. How we managed to eat just one bowl is still a mystery to us but our hearts will undoubtedly thank us.

Poutine Fries

Notes
[1] As it was an early presentation, I skipped breakfast, which meant that by the time I’d finished I was hungry. So a shout out to the good folks at Bruegger’s Bagels on Grant Street in downtown Pittsburgh who supplied me with their Breakfast Bagel, a mouth-watering treat of egg, cheese, and bacon on a crusty whole-wheat bagel. I’m pretty sure it’s not the healthiest of starts to the day but it sure is one of the tastiest.

[2] Stubbs, M. (2010). Three concepts of keywords. In M. Bondi and M. Scott (Eds.) Keyness in Texts: Studies in Corpus Linguistics. John Benjamins Publishing: Philadelphia.

[3] Davies, M. (2008-) The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 425 million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

[4] As our Canadian friend will know, Poutine Fries originated in Quebec and therefore represent a form of biological warfare against America, the intent being to bring the country to its knees by making everyone too fat to get up off of them. Rest assured that on their next trip to Montreal, the Dudes will make sure they take advantage of sampling the local Poutine Fries and would encourage anyone taking a trip to Canada to do the same!

The Dudes Do ISAAC 2012: Day 1. Of Puck and Patois

Shame on you, Wolfgang Puck. Shame, shame, shame! Were you drunk when you allowed the company that supplies coffee to the William Penn hotel in Pittsburgh to use you name on their product? Did you even taste this piss-poor slop before you signed the check? Like most of us, I’ve seen enough TV cooking shows to know that there’s no surer way to get booted out of Hell’s Kitchen than to admit to Chef Ramsey that you didn’t taste your food before serving it to the customer. I suppose this rule only applies to amateurs and hopefuls. Once you become a celebrity chef, you’re allowed to serve a dog turd so long as it has a fancy garnish, a clever name, and warm vomit drizzled around the edges of the plate. [1]

Puck’s Signatue Swill

The Wolfgang Puck “Signature Blend” has about as much in common with coffee as King Herod had with childcare. The only reason I could come up with for brewing a cup of this brown, acrid sludge was to use as a dye to cover up minor scuffs on my shoes – although I’d still worry a little about what it might do to the leather.

I can accept that hotel coffee is not there to provide satisfaction but merely to offer a quick, although weak, shot of caffeine to tide you over until you can find some real stuff. However, there’s a point at which is is so bad that you can provide more customer satisfaction by not providing it all all.

The Puck coffee has the laughingly ironic tagline of “live, love, eat,” which I suggest, in the interest of truth in advertising, should be amended to “live, love, eat, then hunt down Wolfgang and force him to drink a bucket of his signature blend.” It really is that bad.

So it was fortunate indeed that the hotel had laid on a few pots of Starbucks coffee for the preconference session I was part of [2]. After a couple of cups and some orange juice, I was hopped up and ready to go by 8:00 a.m., not my choice of starting time for a Saturday morning session but I can’t always have my way.

The title was How Core Vocabulary Works In Five Languages, the specific languages being English, French, German, Spanish, and Mandarin. We slipped in a mention of Japanese but seeing as this is a work-in-progress, there wasn’t much to talk about other than that it’s a project.

Core vocabulary is made up of words that can be used across ages, clinical categories, topics, and situations. For example, that, want, mine, and in pop in a number of research studies that include data collected from toddlers [3] and pre-schoolers [4] to elderly women [5] and Australian fast-food diners [6]. From the non-AAC world, large scale corpora studies also show a high frequency predominance of a relatively small number of common words [7, 8, 9]. More interesting is the fact that the same words are represented with relatively similar frequency across all languages.

The main thrust of the day was to say that given we can identify core, high-frequency words in a language, these are the ones we need to focus upon as a major component of an AAC system: in short, teaching you and want is better than teaching hamster and umbrella. As I’ve said before – and will probably keep saying – this doesn’t mean hamster and umbrella are not important but that based solely on the objective data about word frequencies, there is more “bang for buck” to be had from you and want than hamster and umbrella. Words such as the latter two are not core words but fringe – words which are low in general frequency, appear in limited situations, and in specific populations. In a couple of days I’ll be posting a report on my next presentation which suggests we need a three-way classification; core words, key words, and fringe words.

Anyway, the take-away for the day was that focusing on teaching a high-frequency core of around 350 words is a much more productive intervention that a random set of 350 words that include a lot of low-frequency nouns.

Tomorrow is Sunday and a day of rest for the Dudes.

Perhaps…

Notes
[1] Essence du Chien with a remoulade d’emesis.

[2] Yes, I have ended a sentence in a preposition but this less formal than “…the preconference session of which I was a part.” Like splitting infinitives or starting sentences with prepositions, sometimes breaking style rules is fine, especially in the colloquial world of blogging. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the Dudes won’t take a swipe at other folks who continue to consistently flout the rules.

[3] Banajee, M., DiCarlo, C. and Stricklin, C. (2003). Core Vocabulary Determination for Toddlers. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 19, 2, 67-73.

[4] Marvin, C.A., Beukelman, D.R. and Bilyeu, D. (1994). Vocabulary use patterns in preschool children: effects of context and time sampling. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 10, 224-236.

[5] Stuart, S., Vanderhoof, D. and Beukelman, D.R. (1993). Topics and vocabulary use patterns of elderly women. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 9, 95-110.

[6] Balandin, S., & Iacono, T. (1999). Crews, Wusses, and Whoppas: Core and Fringe Vocabulary in Australian Meal-Break Conversations in the Workplace. Augmentative and Alternative Communication, 15, 95-109.

[7] The Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus (LOB): Hofland, S. and Johannson, K. (1984). Word frequencies in British and American English. The Norwegian Computer Centre for the Humanities: Longman.

[8] The British National Corpus (BNC): Leech, G., Rayson, P. and Wilson, A. (2001). Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English: based on the British National Corpus. Longman: London.

[9] The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): Davies, M. (2008-) The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 425 million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

Stop with the “Little Words” grab-bag in AAC

I have a proverbial bee in my bonnet today related to the sloppy way that some folks seem to think that designing an AAC system is just a matter of (a) collecting a list of words, (b) adding a set of pictures, and (c) sticking them on pages. This is errant nonsense, positively dangerous, and, after over 30 years of living in a world where AAC systems have been in operation, a sad indictment of how little we appear to have learned. Is that strong enough for yah?

Angry Bee

The number of popular press articles that have erupted in the past year or so about how the iPad can be magically used to provide “voices for the voiceless” is staggering. What’s more staggering is that you’d think nothing had ever been done prior to the iPad – as if Steve Jobs (all praise unto His name) invented AAC. Why, one article was positively gushing about how a doctor (it’s always a “doctor”) had invented a new program where he had a page of pictures that – gasp! – spoke recorded messages when you hit a key. Awesome! Who’d have thunk it? [1]

Those of us who’ve been in the field most of that 30 years have typically adopted the perspective of “well, this is raising the awareness of AAC to levels unknown” and “a rising tide raises all boats.” But are we so sure? Do we really think folks are getting some “better deal” because of the 100+ apps that are now available as “AAC solutions” – all of which claim to be The Answer, often supported by little more than some flashy words culled from linguistics and speech science, such as “core,” “morpheme,” “word,” “cognitive,” and, my favorite, “intuitive. Toss in lots of exclamation points [2], a YouTube video of some poor kiddo having their face thrust into an iPad, and bingo… AAC in a box! I hear the product “experts” at Best Buy and the Apple stores are now recommending AAC solutions based on their years of experience in the field. [3]

Which brings me to the topic of linguistic grab-bags as an excuse for avoiding thinking about teaching language.

There are several AAC offerings out there that use a folder/page/list labeled “Little Words.” This turns out to be shorthand for “I don’t really know where to put them so let’s toss ‘em all in one bag.”

There is no particular rationale for these little words other than they are, well… little! And by “little” I mean have few letters. And by “few” I mean somewhere between one and five. So this effectively means we have a collection of words defined as “words with five letters or less.” That’s it. Where is the linguistic coherence here? Are we teaching language or not? If we ARE teaching language – and I’d like to think we are – then putting if, in, is, and it together as “little words” is so tragically far from useful as to be almost negligent.

If we’re OK with also having at, by, of, and be as little words, why not toss in ax, we and me? And once you allow a three-letter word to be classed as a “little word,” your box gets full to overflowing. I’ve seen the and that in the “little word” box, so I see no logical reason why bat, mat, bug, rug, bit, pit, sit, shy, cry ad nauseam shouldn’t be included.

Ah, someone might want to say, but we wouldn’t include bat, mat, bug, rug, and pit because they are THINGS and we can put those in a different folder/list/box. The good news is that now you’re starting to think linguistically, and I’m going to agree with you. But why only do half the job? Why not apply that thinking to your entire vocabulary set?

You see, if you only do half the job, you end up with your “little words” box containing all the words that you couldn’t fit somewhere else. It becomes the Island of Misfit words, a sad collection of poor little lexical orphans with nowhere else to go. [4]

The reality is that little words typically do have somewhere else to go. The trick is to decide where they go and to reflect that within the system you’re designing. In my original list, if can shack up with other conjunctions; in plays nice with other prepositions, is is a verb, and it can cuddle up comfortably with its close friends, the pronouns.

There is no need for “little words.” There is no need for “grab bags.” What there is is a need for rationale, intelligent, informed thinking based on what we know about language and what we’ve learned over the past 40+ years of AAC.

And shame on us if we don’t shout this out loudly for fear of being labelled reactionary, old-fashioned, out-of-touch, or plain wrong. If you’re claiming to have a “good” AAC app and you have a “little words” package, my question is simple…

Why?

Notes
[1] For the hard-of-thinking, let’s get one thing cleared up right now: My beef is not with the development of solutions for technology, whatever that technology may be. I’m all for it. Why, I have more technology in my room than Lindsay Lohan has rehab appointments. My beef is with poor, misleading, and “tossed-together-because-it-seems-easy” solutions. There are a some very good solutions to a range of speech and language problems out there – and that includes non-AAC offerings – but frankly, there’s more junk than substance. Catch me at a conference, buy me a drink, and I’ll name names and give you specifics, but I ain’t gonna get into an online slanging match with individuals. But you know who you are!

[2] I’m willing to bet that there is an inverse relationship between the number of exclamation points used in an article and its veracity (that’s “truthiness” for the Stephen Colbert fans.) When you see anything that includes such typography and words as “New!!” “Faster!!!!” or “Game Changing!!!!!” take a deep breath and move on. “Sober marketing” is an oxymoron and if something smell like a 3:00 a.m. infommercial, it probably is.

[3] If you’re skeptical of this claim, try this: go to your local Best Buy, grab a random blue-jacketed employee, and ask them to show you an iPad. Then ask them if it could be used with someone with a “speech problem” or even “autism.” See what happens.

[4] At this point, I have visions of a cartoon version of An Officer and a Gentleman with the Richard Gere character played by the word of, sobbing uncontrollably in front of a drill sergeant crying, “Don’t you do it! Don’t! You… I got nowhere else to go! I got nowhere else to g… I got nothin’ else.”

The Dudes Do ATIA Orlando 2012: Day 3. Of Data and Describbling

The great thing about starting a day on a bad note is that usually, it can only get better. This morning’s “bad note” was to make a pot of coffee using the water from the faucet in the hotel room. Big mistake. Huge. I’m pretty convinced that all hotels have special filters installed that turn perfectly acceptable water into something that tastes as if it’s just dripped off an industrial sludge compactor, and to which is added a selection of chemical cleaners that are banned by the United Nations. Call me cynical, but the fact that they also strategically place bottles of water right next to the faucet  and charge more than a cost of gas. Seriously, $5.00 for 1/2 gallon of water. This also explains why the “water-powered car” has yet to be invented – it’d be too expensive to run!

Must... try... to... swallow...

After at least two mouthfuls of the warm, brown liquid that was clinging hopefully to the side of my cup, I decided to use it to descale the sink and poured it down the drain. There! Better now.

The day did, indeed, improve because I’d managed to schedule more sessions than meetings, so I had the pleasure of sitting back to listen to presenters and describbling notes in my notebook.

Describble is a real word, even though my spell checker disagrees. Honestly. It’s in the Oxford English Dictionary, and that, for me, is a working definition of “real” as far as words are concerned. [1] It is, however, not a particularly popular or well-used item. In fact, it is credited as being a nonce word. And for those for whom nonce is new, it means “a word apparently used only ‘for the nonce’, i.e. on one specific occasion or in one specific text or writer’s works.” [2]

Geeky as I may sometimes seem to be (although technically I’m more of a nerd than a geek) I still find that my favorite piece of technology for a conference is a pen and a notebook. I can still write faster than I can type or swype, and there’s also something vaguely satisfying about seeing brown ink dry quickly on cream paper, watching the light momentarily flash off of the wet blaze as you describble quickly across the parchment.

Low-tech "tablet" or "notebook"

And I describbled a lot at the presentation by Deborah Witkowski entitled Data Collection in AAC: Gathering Performance and Outcomes Evidence. Debbie talked about the difference between standardized evaluations and profiles/inventories, and how it makes sense to be eclectic in your choices. In AAC, she stressed that “measurement” is not just counting words but looking at access, vocabulary, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. She also encouraged people to do two basic things before implementing any therapeutic intervention; (a) take a baseline measure and (b) determine you measure of success. This may seem obvious but once of the current issues with the iApp approach to AAC is that there is little to no data being collected. The “baseline” is typically “we downloaded this app” and the measure of success is “Bob is now communicating” but with NO specification as to what “communicating” is; and I have seen YouTube videos where folks push the iPad against the child’s hand and say “Look, he said it!”[3]

Debbie provided her slides as a PDF so we have them available for you at the Speech Dudes Box account:

Witokowski 2012 Data Collection in AAC

Today was an 8:00 to 5:00 day, which is not different from a normal day, but somehow at a conference, by the end of several sessions, you feel a little drained. Sitting down and listening seems like an easy thing to do but oddly it uses energy. Well, something must be using up energy because by the time I was back at my room around 5:45 p.m. I was pretty much ready for a nap. Or maybe I’m just old.

…but not too old. By 7:00 p.m. I was revitalized and ready to eat, although not ready to take a long trip somewhere. So, we went to the hotel’s Tropicale restaurant for a delicious Shrimp Bisque, followed by a Seafood Pasta, generously loaded with chunks of salmon, swordfish, scallops, and crab claws, all washed down with ice-cold, lime stuffed Coronas. On the way back, we called in at our friends’ villa and spent the rest to the evening chatting, laughing, and helping to clear the refrigerator of beer.

I’d forgotten all about the morning coffee.

Notes
[1] I’m also one of those who recommends the Urban Dictionary as a source for current slang and entertainment, but a word’s presence in the UD doesn’t classify it yet as a “real” word for me – more of a “hopeful monster” ready for being tested against lexical natural selection.

[2] It’s also been used more recently (since the 1970′s) to mean a sexual pervert, particularly a child molester. It may derive from the earlier nance or nancy, a word to describe a homosexual male, which in turn comes from 19th century slang for buttocks. Once again, the Dudes have access to facts you didn’t even know you wanted to know!

[3] There’s a whole minefield of issues out there with regard to “over-the-counter” AAC, where parents skip any evaluation of their child and use YouTube, iTunes, and “the nice man at Best Buy” to decide what app is best. One step toward improving the situation is to determine measures of performance, preferably built into apps. Of course, many app “designers” won’t want this because measurement not only shows success but also failure. The importance attached to success makes us loath to see failure as a critical measure; and knowing something is NOT working is as valuable as knowing it is.

Intel About to Save the AAC World? Hardly!

January 8^th is the birthday of a very famous person – other than me. If  you hadn’t noticed, there’s been a scattering of articles in the media lately about Stephen Hawking because it’s his 70^th birthday. As you might expect, this has raised some awareness and comment about his AAC system. And as you might also expect, a fair junk of it is wrong, trivial, or just plain silly. Still, it’s an opportunity for folks to crawl out of the woodwork and try to bask in some reflected glory.

Happy 70th Stephen Hawking

Enter the Chief Technology Officer of Intel, Justin Rattner, in an interview with TechNews World, which you can read at the link below:

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/74143.html

Justin clearly has a passion for marketing AAC. Apparently, “Intel is planning to gather data for further study on developing a new speech system for Hawking,” says Rattner, who is some 25-years late to the party.

“We can look at expression detection. Those who know him say they can detect expressions, and even if we only detect two, we have Morse code for example,” he suggested. Oooh, Morse code – there’s a new idea, Justin! Such razor-sharp intelligence is clearly why you’re the CTO.

“Whatever techniques we end up using, they have to be instantly usable, requiring no learning curve, and throughout all of this, we have to take great care to be sensitive to Stephen and his condition.” Crikey, Justin, is your Master’s degree in Technology or Obviousity? I suppose when you’re a CTO you can invent any solution you like with full knowledge that you won’t actually have to do it yourself.

“Eye movement detection is another option, but may be limited due to problems with accuracy.” I wonder if he’s ever heard of Tobii, who have not only developed such solutions but been selling them for years! Whatever Justin’s getting paid, it’s too much. Still, the link between performance and pay disappears when you get to the C-level; at that stage you get paid for NOT getting into too much trouble,[1] and platitudes are much better than products.

On the upside, the article writer talked to Carrie Bruce, an SLP at Georgia Tech, who has worked in AAC for some time and who provided a much more realistic comment:  “However, it is less about the control interface and more about an efficient and effective way for people to use language. There is a science to representing a person’s whole system of language through software, and often HCIs (health care information solutions) focus more on the interface and less on language.” Hoorah for that!!

I have a way to go to catch up with Stephen’s 70^th but I suspect my mindset of being curmudgeonly and cynical is way ahead of him already! But when I see what is clearly corporate opportunism masquerading as concern, I get a little tetchy.

Now, where’s that bottle of bourbon…?

Notes
[1] Drunken parties, mis-use of the company jet, and sex with prostitutes is OK as long as you don’t get caught out – or at least as long as you have an alibi. Provided your expense account is appropriately annotated (do not use “$1000 for high-class hooker” but instead try “$1000 for customer interview”) you can get away with murder (especially if you simply hire a hit man rather than do it yourself.)

Baths and Showers: “Taking” or “Having”?

In the 3rd century BCE, the philosopher Archimedes was taking a long bath and playing with his rubber duck. To be honest, it may not have been a rubber duck but he was dunking something in and out of the water because according to legend, he leapt out, ran down the street, and shouted “Eureka!” which is Greek for “I’ve found it!” [1] What he’d found was a method of finding out how to decide if a gold crown was actually made of gold without melting it down, which you can do by dropping it in water and measuring the amount of liquid that gets displaced. This became known as Archimedes’ Principle but sadly he neglected to trademark the phrase or sell the slogan on togas so he failed to make a fortune from this well-known piece of intellectual property.

Eureka!

Having ideas in the bath is something with which most people are familiar. There’s clearly something about being submerged in warm water that gets the brain a-buzzing, doubtless supported by a slew of research studies that talk about expanded arteries, endorphins, and brain scans.

So this morning while I was in the shower, I got to thinking about how I actually talked about the process of showering i.e. did I say “I’m going to take a shower” or “I’m going to have a shower.” Now before you read any further, think about which of those two sentences sounds “right” to you.

If you’re American, I’m predicting you use “take” whereas if you’re British, I’m going to say you said “have.” If you’re Canadian, Australian, or a New Zealander, I’d be happy to hear from you because I’m less sure – but if I had to take a guess, I think you’re a “haver” not a “taker.”

The reason I can be so confident is that I checked out the incidence of the use of the verbs have and take in relation to bathing and showering using the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American (COCA). I’ve mentioned these corpora before and I encourage you again to think about using them to help make decisions about real world language usage. [2]

All I did was to search for the phrases “take a bath/shower” and “have a bath/shower” in each corpus and use a simple percentage score to create the following table:

"have" versus "take"

Feel free to perform a Chi-square analysis on this if you want but the figures look significant enough without whipping out the calculator. Notice that the have/take skew is much more pronounced for American English than British English but even the latter is pretty big.

Because I work primarily in AAC, I use this sort of information about language use in the real world for developing systems. And such data also critical for teaching communication strategies. It’s not enough to simply aim to teach words as individual items because words exist within the context of other words, and those relationships are critical to understanding. For example, given the data I’ve just demonstrated, teaching the word bath along with take would make perfect sense if I’m working in the US but back in the UK, I’d be better served focusing on using have with bath.

Knowledge of word collocation can be tremendously useful when creating intervention plans, and tools such as the COCA and BNC do this. Staying with the word bath, I did a collocation search for the words that appear immediately before and after it. The words hot and bubble are the top two that go before bath, with water appearing both before and after in almost equal amounts. With this sort of collocation information, I can be confident in teaching the words hot, bubble, and water along with bath, which not only adds new words to my client’s lexicon but also provides real contextual information about how the word bath is used.

 For more about the COCA and BNC corpora – and others – go to Mark Davies’ corpus.byu.edu site and explore the interface. It’s a wonderful resource and much underused by speech pathologists methinks.

Notes
[1] The Greek word εὑρίσκω means “I find” and εὑρηκα is the perfect form meaning “I have found.” Greek declensions aside, Archimedes was clearly pretty excited about something.

[2] I’m aware that the COCA and BNC differ in relation to when they were created; the BNC data is from 1980-1993 whereas the COCA is more current with data from 1990-2011. However, given that this is a known variable, it’s still reasonable to make comparisons.

It’s Christmas! Let’s Talk Turkey – or Maybe Not…

I guess it’s officially the Christmas season according to my good friends at SiriusXM Radio. I know because two weeks when I turned on to channel 17, the Love Channel, I discovered it’s now been replaced by the Holly Channel, a selection of music that ranges;

…from contemporary holiday music to traditional favorites, make the Christmas party hop with songs by Justin Bieber, Mariah Carey, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Richard Marx, Gloria Estefan Colbie Caillat, Josh Groban, Michael Buble and more.

Justin Bieber? He’s old enough to have recorded a selection of Christmas classics? Ye Gods, am I old!

SiriusXM Holly Channel

It seems that in a massive US cultural shift, Thanksgiving is no longer the definitive opening day for the seasonal mayhem. Sure, Black Friday – the day after Thanksgiving – will remain the canonical capitalists’ wet dream for the foreseeable future but I’m pretty sure I’ve been seeing Christmas trees and decorations in the shops for a few weeks already. The new marker is probably Labor Day, which, for the non-US reader, is at the beginning of September. You might not be allowed to wear white fashionably after Labor Day but you can now whip out the Christmas tree and starting playing “We Three Kings” over the store PA system.

It’s also the time of year when therapists are tempted to whip up a new collection of symbols and pages for their clients using AAC systems. After all, there’s a whole bunch of new and exciting words that can be added, such as “Santa,” “holly,” “reindeer,” “mistletoe,” “turkey,” “engorged,” “egg nog,” and “pass-me-the-remote-I’m-too-heavy-to-move.” Why, I even typed in “Christmas vocabulary” into Google and found a number of sites that offered me a selection of words I hadn’t even considered. How could I forget such essentials as “frankincense,” “myrrh,” “poinsettia,” “solstice,” “yule,” “dreidel” and “Scrooge.” [1]

Ebenezer Scrooge - Alistair Simm

But before you are tempted to spend many happy hours creating such lists, downloading images, programming pages, and all that good stuff, consider the difference between a REFERENTIAL and a DESCRIPTIVE teaching approach.

A referential approach focuses on the identification and naming of things. If you have a set of symbols for “chimney,” “cranberry,” “fir,” and “snowflake,” teaching your client to nominate each of these by pointing at the picture or pressing a button on a speech-generating device is referential: you are pairing a word with a referent. In contrast, a descriptive approach would focus on having a client use vocabulary that talks about items, not just labeling them.

Let’s look at a concrete example with just two words; “reindeer” and “tree.”

reindeer tree

 You can add the REINDEER to your system – whether that’s a manual board, a flipbook, or a device – and then procede to teach it. Do whatever you have to do to make that link between the picture, the sound of the word, and the things “out there” that pulls Santa’s sleigh or ends up served with gravy on a plate. (What? You didn’t know reindeer is a food? Sorry to crush any “Bambi” or “Rudolph” fantasies there!)

Then you can move on to do the same for TREE, with modeling, imitating, generating, and generalizing as target behaviors. And at the end of this, your client will have learned “reindeer” and “tree.”

But if you want to get more bang for buck, why not switch it up a little and worry more about teaching words that can be used to talk about reindeer and tree. For example, “Tell me about a tree” can be answered using words like “big,” “tall,” “green,” “hard,” “grow,” “it,” and so on. Pointing at a picture of a tree and asking “What’s this?” has one response; “tree.” [2]

Before folks start foaming at the mouth and calling me an “anti-nounist,” let’s be clear that nouns are, and always will be, an important part of a vocabulary. Nouns are the largest part of the English lexicon, so no system can avoid them. However, because nouns are (a) easy to picture and (b) seem so fundamental to our lives, it’s possible to develop a noun bias when designing AAC systems. [3] Once you acknowledge this can happen, it becomes easier to think about using nouns as a core-word pivot for teaching more generic, more useful, higher frequency common words. [4]

And finally, good news on the Christmas music front: I’ve been listening to the Holly Channel while writing this and so far, no Justin Bieber. And if I didn’t have the words “Justin Bieber” available in an AAC system, I could use it as a core-word pivot and say “He is not who I like. I want him to go away. He is short, he is small, and I don’t think he can sing. I think I am too old to like him and that is not a bad thing.”

Notes
[1] If you’re looking for a fun Christmas movie, you should consider the under-rated but deliciously dark Scrooged with Bill Murray. There are some wonderful one-liners and Murray, as always, is the master of timing and facial expression.

[2] One of the more enduring concepts that has come from psychoanalysis into everyday consciousness is that of encouraging someone to talk about themselves and their feelings. “Tell me about your mother” as opposed to “Which parent screwed you up more?” results in a much richer sample of language for the analyst. By the same token, asking “Tell me about ‘trees’” will force a response semantically richer than “What’s that tall, woody thing with leaves?”

[3] I suggest that the noun bias in picture-based AAC system is an artificial construct driven by the nature of the medium being used – pictures on paper, in books, or on a device. Because nouns are inherently easier to represent pictorially than other parts of speech (try drawing “mouse” then “something” and you’ll see the challenge), the bias towards nouns is therefore built-in to the system. I doubt anyone actually sits down and thinks, “Let’s see if I can create a set of pictures with thousands of nouns” but like a train on the tracks, the rails already point you toward a particular destination.

[4] Rather than treating a noun as “the name of a person, place, or thing,” recasting it as a core-word pivot turns it into word that “functions in relation to other words in different grammatical classes, and signals relationships between them.” If you use the word “tree” to also trigger associations with “tall,” “plant,” “grow,” “green” and so on, you’re actually teaching a fundamental property of language – that words can have both denotative and connotative references. If someone didn’t learn this basic notion, then they wouldn’t be able to comprehend metaphor; and metaphor is language. A second value of treating nouns as core-word pivots is that you have a metric to help you decide what nouns to choose; those that pivot more core are better.