CISLL Celebrates National Speech-Language-Hearing Month
What technologies are available to people who have something to say but, for one reason or another, cannot communicate with their voice?
One option is augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices, which allow people who cannot rely on their speech to converse with others. They commonly take the form of boards with pictures or symbols that represent words and can be combined to build phrases or sentences. People who commonly use AAC include children with communication disorders, such as apraxia of speech or autism, or adults who have experienced a stroke or a traumatic brain injury.
AAC devices are usually designed with a monolingual user in mind. But what about bilinguals who use an ACC device to communicate?
Bilingual speakers often code-switch while speaking, seamlessly combining aspects of both of their languages within the same sentence or even within the same word. This kind of seamless code-switching is not possible on a traditional AAC device.
Although many AAC devices allow a bilingual user to access each of their languages, the devices are designed in such a way that access is limited to a single language at a time. Further, most devices contain translated vocabulary from English into the bilinguals’ other language. As a result, the device might contain words that are not useful or sound awkward in the other language, while lacking many words that are commonly used.
How can bilingual AAC users effectively code-switch using their devices? How can they access real-life vocabulary, not just English-translated vocabulary, on their devices?
These were questions Vianca Ocampo, NIU speech-language pathology (SLP) master’s student and CISLL’s 2024 Outstanding Student Award recipient, sought to answer. And for Ms. Ocampo, the topic was personal.
“I grew up in the Philippines, and being bilingual was basically the norm,” shared Ms. Ocampo. “We have two official languages, which are Tagalog and English, and there is a bilingual education policy in which it is mandated to use both languages in school. So, a lot of children grow up to be bilingual or multilingual.”
Why does having one bilingual core board for children using AAC matter?
“Well, it’s easier to make sentences if the children have one board that is in Tagalog and English,” explained Ms. Ocampo. “What we have now for our AAC devices is they have to toggle between English to Tagalog, or Tagalog to English,” which is laborious and time-consuming. “Having both languages in one board makes it easier for them to use both of their languages in one sentence and to code switch,” Ms. Ocampo elaborated.
In the Philippines, Ms. Ocampo explains, “[People] code switch a lot, which is they mix both of their languages together.” With a bilingual AAC board, “the children could have access to both their languages and vocabulary words that would be meaningful for them.”
However, there was a problem.
“There weren’t any AAC core boards with both Tagalog and English vocabulary words or code-switched sentence structures that fit typically developing bilingual Tagalog-English children’s language productions,” Ms. Ocampo lamented. “So, I decided to make one.”
This need inspired Ms. Ocampo to make the creation of a bilingual Tagalog-English core communication board the topic of her master’s thesis. Her mentor for the project was CISLL Faculty Affiliate and NIU speech-language pathology Assistant Professor, Milijana Buac, PhD, CCC-SLP.
To make sure that the vocabulary on the bilingual core board reflected the words Tagalog-English bilingual children regularly produce, Ms. Ocampo analyzed language samples from 100 bilingual Tagalog-English 4-year-olds from Manila and surrounding cities in the Philippines. She identified the most frequently produced words in Tagalog and English, then used these words to create a Tagalog core communication board, an English core board, and a bilingual Tagalog-English core board. The result was an AAC device that is culturally and linguistically appropriate for Tagalog-English bilingual children in the Philippines.
Because it represents the first ever ecologically valid bilingual core communication board, Ms. Ocampo’s research has gained the attention of AAC researchers, speech-language pathologists, and other AAC users at the national and international levels. In fact, Ms. Ocampo recently received the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association’s Students Preparing for Academic-Research Careers (SPARC) award, an honor awarded to only 12 speech-language pathology or audiology students in the entire U.S.
What are Ms. Ocampo’s next steps for this research?
“I hope to publish it soon and present my work at ASHA [the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Annual Convention] to be able to show SLPs who also work with bilingual clients that a bilingual board is possible, and that you can create it just by analyzing the two languages.”
“I'm also currently working with a group of engineers, creatives, and researchers in the United States and the Philippines to make my work more accessible to Filipino kids. We are currently making a culturally-responsive speech-generating device, which is a high-tech AAC device, that will be the very first research-based Tagalog AAC device. I'm very excited for that one.”
Add Ms. Ocampo to the list of people AAC has helped to find their voice.
About the author: Allison Gladfelter is co-director of CISLL and is an associate professor of Speech-Language Pathology at NIU.
What are Ms. Ocampo’s next steps for this research?
“I hope to publish it soon and present my work at ASHA [the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Annual Convention] to be able to show SLPs who also work with bilingual clients that a bilingual board is possible, and that you can create it just by analyzing the two languages.”
“I'm also currently working with a group of engineers, creatives, and researchers in the United States and the Philippines to make my work more accessible to Filipino kids. We are currently making a culturally-responsive speech-generating device, which is a high-tech AAC device, that will be the very first research-based Tagalog AAC device. I'm very excited for that one.”
Add Ms. Ocampo to the list of people AAC has helped to find their voice.
About the author: Allison Gladfelter is co-director of CISLL and is an associate professor of Speech-Language Pathology at NIU.
