Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Individuals with congenital, neurological or acquired disorders (i.e. Cerebral Palsy, Autism, etc.) can have complex communication needs resulting in reduced intelligibility of speech. These people often require other means of communication in order to interact with their environment and can thus benefit from Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). AAC intervention for children with complex communication needs relies on the selection of the most appropriate AAC system. Speech-generating devices (SGD) produce an electronic voice output(Lloyd, Fuller, & Arvidson, 1997) allowing an individual who has a complex communication needs to actively participate in conversations (Blischak, Lombardino, & Dyson, 2003). Good navigational skills are required to find vocabulary programmed within SGDs with dynamic pages (Drager & Light, 2006; Reichle & Drager, 2010). Previous studies have underlined the implications of cognitive abilities during navigation (i.e. attention, reasoning, categorisation, cognitive flexibility, etc.), and more interestingly, the fact that they can predict navigational success (Robillard et al., 2013; Wallace, Hux, & Beukleman, 2010; Rondeau, Robillard, & Roy-Charland, under review). However, the role of specific cognitive abilities differs according to the studied population.In fact, no study has examined the cognitive demands associated with navigating an SGD among children with complex communication needs.This information could help clinicians during the assessment and device selection process for this clinical population. The purpose of this study is to establish the subset of cognitive factors that best predict the ability to navigate an SGD with dynamic paging among these children.