Children’s use of strategies to circumvent a limited graphic symbol vocabulary: a descriptive study of utterances created by children using Blissymbolics

Children without speech and with severe motor impairments need aided communication. Unless they master orthographic writing, graphic symbols must be provided for them. Communication aids typically contain a limited number of graphic symbols, but children using Blissymbolics may create new words, for example by combining characters and indicators. However, information is lacking about how they utilize these possibilities. This study explores utterance constructions made by children using Blissymbolics due to lack of intelligible speech, when the Bliss-words they needed were not available on their communication aid. Participants were five Swedish children, three boys and two girls, aged 6½ to 14 years, who used Blissymbolics. The utterances were collected from five tasks from the Becoming an Aided Communicator (BAC) project: 1) BAC Naming Objects, 2) BAC Describing Objects Without Naming, 3) BAC Describing Visual Scenes, 4) BAC Describing Video Events, and 5) BAC Instructing and Constructing. Using content analysis, utterances were analyzed to identify, classify and count strategies used. A total of 164 substitutions of lexical items were identified and grouped into three categories: semantic, linguistic, and graphic awareness. Strategies demonstrating semantic awareness were most common, comprising 57.3% of the substitutions. Results suggest that use of Blissymbolics may aid the development of semantic and linguistic awareness by allowing creative use of available graphic vocabulary to provide information that is novel to the listener.