Narrative construction by an aided speaker: a pilot study

Purpose: Story-telling is recognised as important to child language development. However, children who use electronic communication aids have limited opportunities to develop their story-telling compared to their natural speaking (NS) peers. The "Telling Stories"' project aims to explore narrative construction in teaching staff-aided communicator dyads. Design/methodology/approach: A pilot study was conducted to examine the feasibility of research methods. Video data were captured during a fictional story-telling task. Two measures were investigated: communicative modality; and linguistic move type. Momentary time sampling (MTS) was applied to the video to determine range and proportions of communicative modalities in use. A coding framework was applied to determine the distribution of linguistic move-types across the interlocutors. Findings: The findings revealed multimodal contributions from both interlocutors. The linguistic move-type coding indicates the NS assumed a more dominant, initiating role. MTS was shown to be an appropriate methodology for this research. Originality/value: The pilot provides provisional data regarding narrative constructions of an aided speaker and tests the efficacy of the MTS methodology prior to the full study. Refinements to the protocol to be used in the main study are reported. The main study aims to provide detailed analysis of the narrative constructions of aided speakers, currently an area with little existing research.