Symbols
Symbols used on high and low-tech AAC systems include graphic, auditory, gestural and textural symbols to represent objects, actions and concepts. For users with literacy skills, both low and high-tech devices may use alphabet-based symbols including individual letters, whole words, or parts thereof. With low-tech devices, the communication partner must interpret the symbols chosen whereas a high-tech device can speak the created message aloud. Several large graphic symbol sets have been developed; these include Blissymbols, which possess linguistic characteristics such as grammatical indicators, and the more iconic Picture Communication Symbols (PCS) which do not. Tactile symbols are textured objects, real objects or parts of real objects that are used as a communication symbols particularly for individuals with visual impairments and/or significant intellectual impairments. Auditory symbols such as choices of spoken words or Morse code can also be integrated with assistive technology for the visually impaired.
The choice of symbols and aspects of their presentation, such as size and background, depend on an individual's preferences as well as their linguistic, visual, and cognitive skills.
Read more about this topic: Augmentative And Alternative Communication
Famous quotes containing the word symbols:
“Many older wealthy families have learned to instill a sense of public service in their offspring. But newly affluent middle-class parents have not acquired this skill. We are using our children as symbols of leisure-class standing without building in safeguards against an overweening sense of entitlement—a sense of entitlement that may incline some young people more toward the good life than toward the hard work that, for most of us, makes the good life possible.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards, it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms; but first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)