ABSTRACT
Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) is an applied discipline that draws information and insights from developmental psychology, educational sciences, and especially psycholinguistics. The general question is whether the modifications to communication (modalities, speech, lexical storage) that are critical to AAC create alternative parallel psycholinguistic trajectories. Does the micro-genesis of an AAC utterance differ dramatically from natural speech? The issue is particularly relevant to lexical access and to phonological encoding. In the first place, what is the relation between lexical elements stored in an external device (the AAC device) with the actual internal lexicon of the user? Is the internal lexicon determined by the lexical choices that are available on the device, or that are provided by the AAC system?
A second psycholinguistic question is whether the execution of the sequence of actions on the device should be considered the equivalent of articulatory gestures in natural speech. Practitioners and researchers have formulated differing views on the nature of the execution of the actions, varying from a semantic-iconic strategy to a strategy of motor planning.
In other words, while AAC is partially based on psycholinguistic assumptions, it also provides a testing ground of the variability in which micro-genesis of utterances occur.
