Ricerc@Sapienza

A number of attempts have been made to capture the discourse of AAC users (Beukelman, et al.
1984; Vertanen & Kristensson, 2011) but only one corpus exists that explicitly focusses on the
language of AAC users and non-AAC users in the workplace. In this chapter, we will discuss the
work that has been done to describe AAC users’ discourse and research conducted using the
AAC and non-AAC workplace corpus (ANAWC) (Pickering & Bruce, 2009). This work has
shown that AAC users often prefer to vocalize instead of using their devices in interaction in
order to inhabit the same “time stream” as their interlocutors (Bouchard, 2016; Friginal,
Pickering & Bruce, 2016). We expand this work and compare the speech produced by AAC
users while using their devices and when vocalizing. The data from the ANAWC are
separated in two sub corpora: one that includes all the vocalizations made by the AAC users, and
one that includes all the speech produced using their devices. These sub corpora are analyzed
quantitatively, looking at word frequency and word clusters, and qualitatively, focusing on the
situations when the speakers vocalize or use their devices. This advances our understanding
of the discourse of AAC users in the workplace in a way that would not be possible without the
use of corpora.