Retrospective insights into AAC interface design and spoken language in chronic aphasia

This retrospective case series examined the impact of personally relevant photographs and accompanying text on the spoken discourse of four people with chronic aphasia (PWA) using a high-tech AAC system with visual scene displays (VSDs). Analysis of the informativeness and syntactic complexity of the participants' narrative retells revealed individualized patterns of spoken language performance for each PWA, underscoring the complexity of these findings. Although personally relevant photographs and text supported communicative success in the original study, they did not consistently translate into superior spoken language performance in the current analysis. These findings highlight the importance of future research that more carefully control extraneous variables that were not feasible to address in this retrospective case series. Finally, the results suggest that direct instruction may be necessary to maximize spoken output while simultaneously supporting communication during moments of word retrieval difficulty.