Brevity and speed of message delivery trade-offs in augmentative and alternative communication

Abstract

This study is the third in a series of studies that have concentrated on utterance-based systems—which allow the relatively quick selection of full sentences—and investigated trade-offs faced by users of such systems when there is a pragmatic mismatch between the prestored sentence and the current discourse context. While the previous studies focused on trade-offs between speed of message delivery and either relevance or informativeness, this study investigated the effects of trade-offs between speed of message delivery and brevity on public attitudes. Participating were 96 sales clerks who viewed scripted, videotaped trade-off message conditions in the context of a bookstore interaction and completed a questionnaire designed to assess their attitudes toward customers who used utterance-based systems and his or her communication. Significantly higher mean ratings were found for the trade-off condition involving the quickly delivered message with repetition when compared to each of the slowly delivered, non-repetitive message conditions (i.e., with and without a preceding conversational floorholder). Implications regarding the model of conversational trade-off choices and its technological applications are discussed.

Keywords:

• Augmentative and alternative communication
• Attitudes
• Communicative competence
• Communicative interaction
• Model
• Theory