AAC and Aphasia

This text-based course is a written transcript of the course, "AAC and Aphasia" presented by Sarah Wallace, Ph.D. on March 22, 2011.

This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication access realtime translation (cart) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be totally verbatim. The consumer should check with the moderator for any clarifications of the material.

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Hello Everyone, and welcome to the SpeechPathology.com Virtual Conference on Augmentative and Alternative Communication. We are honored to have Filip Loncke serving as guest moderator this week. Today's seminar, "AAC and Aphasia", by Sarah Wallace, is the second in our weeklong series of seminars about AAC.

[Applause]

>> Filip Loncke: It is an honor for me to be able to chair this whole week. Yesterday we had acknowledged the original group and today we will talk about our speaker who will talk about AAC and aphasia, which I personally think is one of the most amazing sub-fields of AAC. Aphasia in itself is a very interesting area. I'm sure that our speaker will talk about the fact that AAC is bringing an important contribution both in helping us to understand what aphasia is and also in doing something about it. AAC is a great means in helping people to recover. When recovery is limited or impossible, AAC can be an excellent alternative for spoken communication. So I'm very pleased that at the time I was looking for the right people who would speak this week, that I met Sarah Wallace about 6 months ago at the conference in Iowa. Sarah is presently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech Language Pathology at Duquesne University in Clinical Research, and her teaching experiences involve adults with acquired neurogenic communication disorders with additional emphasis on those people who utilize AAC systems and strategies. Dr. Wallace's research aims to examine ways to improve the use of AAC systems by people with aphasia and communication disorders that result from traumatic brain injury. Without much further ado, I would like to give the microphone to Sarah Wallace.

[Applause]

>> Sarah Wallace: All right, thanks, Filip, and thanks, Amy, for that really kind introduction. I really am excited to be here today talking to you about aphasia and AAC. As Filip mentioned, it is a really exciting area. There are a lot of new things going on, so I hope to share my enthusiasm for all these new things that are going on with you. Here's just a quick list of some of the things that I'm hoping you can take away from my talk today. I want to talk about some of the unique factors about aphasia, the AAC challenges that tend to arise from some of those unique factors and how we can put those together to do evaluations and also then to provide treatment for people with aphasia.

AAC Definitions

The best place to start is to make sure that we're all on the same page. I want to review some definitions of AAC and aphasia and how the two come together and why they come together. So let's begin there.

The definition from ASHA about what AAC is really talks about how it is more than just a single device. It is a group of strategies, techniques and devices that do one of two things: They are either supplementing the spoken language or they're replacing spoken language when people have these insufficient or ineffective communication skills. Another important point I would like to make is that almost as important as the definition is the concept that AAC is much more than what speech language pathologists can actually put in front of or give to a person. AAC is also about teaching people to use these tools to be skilled communicators. I said this early on, that I like to present an illustration outside of the world of AAC. I'll pick on myself a little bit. If I use the analogy of basketball, someone can't just hand me a basketball and expect that I become Michael Jordan. I require a lot more skill, practice and support in order to become a skilled basketball player. The same is true for people who are going to be using AAC.