Abstract
This article presents a phenomenological investigation into speech-generating device (SGD) use in the school context. Derived from a larger study on the experience of speaking through a SGD, this article focuses particularly on the experience of time and timing of speaking for one who must use a SGD to give audible voice to their words. Themes explored in this article include the challenge of time, the untimely rate of speech, which can be silencing, planning to talk tomorrow, and finally text time and how this time may lift the burden of time from SGD users. Implications for educators and others who support children and youth who use SGD are brought forward through reflection and discussion of this unique experience of voice and time.
Keywords
It was the first day of school and the first day that Jennifer was in my class. Of course I had seen Jennifer wheeling around the school before. I had even been at an assembly where she spoke with her communication device. I remember thinking wow that’s just like Stephen Hawking. Now Jennifer was wheeling through my door. Good morning Jennifer, I said, welcome to Room 10. Jennifer looked down at her device and pushed some buttons. Beep, beep, beep, THANKS Her assistant, who like always was right behind her, said we will need to have space for me to sit beside her. Sure we can do that and I glanced around the room noticing that it suddenly seemed smaller than it was when I first came in. I could hear the beep beep beep of Jennifer’s device. How about over there? MICHELLE You want to sit by Michelle I asked? Her aide said she sat with Michelle last year. beep beep NOT You don’t want to sit by Michelle? Her aide looked at me and shrugged her shoulders? beep beep beep Jennifer was still looking down at her device . . . beep beep beep HERE As if on cue the bell rang and the rest of the kids started coming in. Hi Ms. M. Hey Ms. M aren’t you glad to have me again this year. Joe are you in this class, that’s sick! Hi Ms. M. Hey Megan, come sit over here! Behind the voices of the kids excitedly filing in, I could hear the faint but somewhat incessant beep beep beep of Jennifer working away on her device. Jennifer, I said, maybe for today you can just sit here by the door. Michelle will probably be here soon. She continued to look down at her device. . . beep beep beep . . . The kids were all here now, and the room was so full of their excited voices that I could no longer really hear Jennifer, although I could hear that in between the beeps she was also speaking words. Okay guys quiet down, I said . . . As they did so, I heard SICK. From Jennifer. Hey Jen, ya Ms. M is way sick . . . Well that’s neat I thought, she even has the kids slang down. Her aide was now looking at her device. Oh did you guys talk last night? Now I was really confused. Jennifer looked up at me, and with one more beep on her device told me what she wanted me to know MICHELLE NOT HERE TODAY SHE IS SICK. Wow, this is going to be more complicated than I thought!
The beginning of every school year brings teachers into contact with new students they know nothing about and known students who come with at least part of their story already told. New and known, teachers attempt to reach and teach their students. The beginning of every school year is an exciting time for teachers and students as they meet and greet one another. Jennifer made this day more exciting than usual for Ms. M. Jennifer is an extraordinary student, different in many ways from any students of Ms. M’s prior students. First, Jennifer rolls rather than walks into the classroom. Second, Jennifer brings an assistant, another adult who will become part of the social and physical makeup of the classroom. Most significantly, due to physical disabilities, Jennifer cannot speak with her own voice. Jennifer uses a machine, a speech-generating device (SGD), to give audible voice to her thoughts.
Classrooms are fast paced and demanding places. It is expected that students enter with the ability to keep up, if not with the academic demands, certainly with the conversational demands. Ms. M had not been expecting anything else from Jennifer. She had heard her speak, not in conversation perhaps, but giving speeches. She had an experience that allowed her to see Jennifer as a capable speaker. What she did not expect, perhaps could not expect, was that speaking with a device does not make one capable of meeting the timely demands of just speaking.
As may be the case for many people, Ms. M’s expectations of what it is like to talk with someone who uses an SGD have developed through encounters with Dr. Stephen Hawking, the eminent physicist who has used an SGD for several decades. During that time, he has made several public appearances, including a cameo appearance on the popular television show the Big Bang Theory. In this spot, Sheldon, one of the main characters in the show and a devout Stephen Hawking “groupie,” gets the opportunity to meet the physicist and discuss his dissertation with him. The conversation, while not quite normal with the beeping of Dr. Hawking’s device and its computerized voice, seems fairly unremarkable. Sheldon and Dr. Hawking converse back and forth in much the same way any budding scholar and distinguished researcher might, with bits of humor thrown in; it is, after all, a situation comedy. What Ms. M and the rest of us watching the Big Bang Theory or listening to Dr. Hawking give lectures with his device are not privy to is the reality of what such a conversation would really entail. These productions are scripted and edited to take out the time, often many minutes, that it takes Dr. Hawking to construct and then speak even a short sentence aloud (Brockes, 2005). The Dr. Hawking that we see through the media presents an idealized if not sanitized view of what it is to speak with a device. What Ms. M was confronted with on the day that Jennifer rolled into her room was the face-to-face, real-time reality of what it is like to speak through a machine. It is little wonder that Ms. M is taken aback with the actuality of what it is to have Jennifer as a participant in her class.
Consider what it might be like to be Jennifer. She has been greeted warmly by a new teacher and, at first, she is given some one-on-one time to get her message across. She works diligently to share something with her teacher that her friend has asked her to convey. But as each word is spoken, it is taken on its own, and its meaning constructed not in relationship but as a separate unit. The time delay is too great to connect the words for Ms. M, yet the time speed is too quick for Jennifer to even begin to keep pace. Then, as is the norm in a classroom, the other voices, voices of students who can speak in real time, enter in. The room fills with voices speaking with, to and, in some instances on top of one another. The exuberant chatter that fills the space and time of the classroom drowns Jennifer’s word-by-word delivery. Her assistant, who can read the message Jennifer has constructed on her device, is the first to “hear” her actual words. And it seems the assistant’s quick audible response to Jennifer’s message draws Ms. M back. Hearing Jennifer’s complete message, Ms. M is both surprised and unnerved by the greater message conveyed and begins to recognize the real complexity of creating an auditory space for Jennifer in her classroom.
The Challenge of Time for SGD Users
We as speaking people may never give a moment’s thought to the process of speaking. We do not take the time to think about entering our words into the flow of our speech. Our thinking and speaking are simultaneous, intertwined, and interwoven. As Merleau-Ponty (1964) suggests, “to make of language a means or a code for thought is to break it” (p. 17). To speak, “we must stop picturing its code or even its message to ourselves, and make ourselves sheer operators of the spoken word” (p. 18). If we had to think about producing each word or even each sentence it may seem so cumbersome and time-consuming we would hardly be able to speak at all. For those who speak there is not thinking about speaking, there is only speaking what we are thinking. Navigating in the time stream of spoken language seems quick, easy, and effortless. Yet this hardly seems to be the case for people who must use an SGD to speak their thoughts aloud. Let us listen as Gabby tells us about speaking with her SGD.
Talking to people with an assistive device is not easy. First I have to think what to say, then I enter those words into my device. Once I have finished my message I push speak to say the words out loud.
Gabby tells us that speaking with a machine is not like speaking. It is a multistep process, one that is decidedly thoughtful and unnaturally slow. Speaking with a SGD seems to involve a first-then series of actions far removed from the ordinary actions of speaking. The device must be “told” a great many things for Gabby to speak aloud. Each of those things takes time. It took Gabby close to 4 min to provide that short response to my query about how she talks with her device. Time that is not taken or expected when a speaking person speaks.
Bellugi and Fischer (1972) suggest a speaking person produces four to five words per second. This analysis would suggest a speaking rate of 240 to 300 words per minute. However, this rate is seldom achieved as conversations are filled with pauses and fillers. Yuan, Liberman, and Cieri (2006) suggest a more realistic estimate of speaking rates of 150 to 170 words per minute. People who use an SGD cannot achieve anything even approximating these rates. Instead, they communicate at rates 15 to 25 times slower that natural speech (Beukelman & Mirenda, 2013).
If a person speaking through a SGD could compose their messages at the rate at which an average professional typist can typically type that would be about half of the normal speaking rate at 70 to 90 words per minutes (Leonard, 2018). Most SGD users can never hope to achieve speech anywhere close to that rate. Even using today’s methods of user interface optimization and rate enhancement methods, communication rates achieved with an SGD are often less than 10 words per minute (Newell, Langer, & Hickey, 1998).
This article inquires into the unique lived experience of time by young people who, due to unruly bodies, cannot make themselves understood with their natural speech alone. Young people who in order to speak their thoughts aloud must do so using an SGD. This exploration of time and timing when speaking through a device is drawn from a larger phenomenological research project undertaken to better understand what it might be like to speak through a machine. In phenomenological investigations, researchers often use the experiences of lived body, lived space, lived relation, lived time, and lived things (known as the existentials) to gain insights to what it might be like to experience the phenomenon at hand (van Manen, 2014). While this article focuses on the experience of lived time, speech is so fundamental to the experience of bringing ourselves into relationship with one another that the experience of lived relations will also be at play. The question under consideration is how is time experienced by young people who use SGDs? What is the lived experience of time in the lifeworld of those whose talk time may be so different from talk time we may take utterly for granted as natural speakers?
Drawing on the approach to phenomenological inquiry as articulated by van Manen (1997, 2014), the aim of this inquiry is to help practitioners in the field of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) gain understanding of experience of speaking with a SGD, most particularly the experience of time in the context of school where communication and social relations are so critical to students’ experiences in the classroom (Cazden, 2001; Chung, Carter, & Sisco, 2012).
Methodological Approach
Phenomenology is the study of the lifeworld—the world as it is immediately experienced. In attempting to gain descriptions of life as it is lived, the prereflective phenomenology offers the possibility of plausible insights that may bring us in more direct contact with the experience at hand.
Phenomenology studies the meaning of lived experience (Brantlinger, Jimenez, Klingner, Pugach, & Richardson, 2005). In the simplest terms, phenomenology may be described as the study of lived experience (van Manen & Adams, 2010, p. 450). Phenomenology is primarily a philosophic method for questioning, not a method for answering or discovering or drawing determinate conclusions (van Manen, 2014, p. 29). It is hoped that through this questioning the researcher may provide readers with new understandings and insights into the meaning of phenomena, in this case the phenomenon of speaking with a SGD.
Gathering Lived Experience Descriptions
In seeking to uncover the prereflective experience, to show what it is like, not to tell about what it is like, phenomenologist situate their investigation in the everyday world (McPhail, 1995). The primary “data” of a phenomenological investigation are lived experience descriptions—concrete examples of experience as it is being lived through. In the larger study from which this article was derived, lived experience descriptions were gathered from many sources. These include from first person accounts of speaking with a SGD from published autobiographical material and from descriptions of SGD use that had been published in the augmentative and alternative communication literature.
While autobiographical materials were explored, the primary source of material for the study was derived from interviews with and close observation of young people who used or had used SGDs in their daily lives. Inclusion criteria for participants included that they be able to provide lived experience descriptions using either their SGD and/or the computer. All were competent AAC users as defined by Light (1989). Seven participants lived with cerebral palsy, one lived with Rett syndrome, and one was living with a degenerative neurological condition. This participant had acquired language prior to speaking with a device. Seven participants used SGD on a daily basis; two relied primarily on no-tech or low tech (letter/word board) to communicate in their daily lives, using SGDs only when giving more formal addresses.
While it is important to understand who the participants were in terms of situating the phenomenon within the population of people with severe speech impairment who had experienced the phenomenon, it is also important to point out that the focus of inquiry is the phenomenon not on making generalizations across any particular population. Phenomenology seeks possible experiences. Experiences that while singular may also elicit understanding of more universal themes.
Lived experience descriptions were gathered through face-to-face interviews; through online responses using email, Facebook, and text messaging; and through close observation of participants going about their daily lives. Participant’s stories were gathered through prolonged field engagement (Brantlinger et al., 2005). In some instances, several months, but in most cases, active engagement with participants went on for 3 to 5 years. Interviews, due to the nature of speaking through a device, would often take several hours, on occasion several days. Observations, most often happened in the context of school, but on occasion would also involve being in other environments (going for dinner, having coffee at a mall, and in one instance a 2-day camping trip). As will become more apparent, the challenge of time looms large for aided communicators.
Once the lived experience descriptions were collected, anecdotes were written by the researcher to bring the experience to life, as it were, for the reader. After construction of these illustrative stories from participants shared experience, a form of member checking (Brantlinger et al., 2005) was undertaken. Participants were asked to read anecdotes constructed from their stories to see the researcher/writer had “gotten it right,” if they recognized this anecdote as being a true rendition of the experience they had shared or lived through.
Writing and Reflection
While the research begins in gathering the stories, the true research, the analysis, happens during the process of writing a phenomenological article. van Manen (2014) suggests a phenomenological study cannot just be written up. The writing is the process of analysis—of creating the resulting texts. Through the writing process, one takes a lived experience description and shapes it (rewrites it) into an evocative anecdote to use to bring the experience into recognizable nearness. Then the reflection begins in earnest through writing. Writing about what the anecdote shows, perhaps bringing in some research from the area as a process of bracketing or making theories and presuppositions clear, looking for insights in meanings of the words that gather around the phenomenon, exploring similar yet different phenomenon to point to what is the unique meaning of the one being explored. All this is done through the writing process, and all this is indeed the research. What follows is the resultant texts constructed through this systematic approach to understanding the essential meaning of lived time for young people who speak through SGDs.
The Lived Experience of Time When Speaking Through a Device
The Delay May Speak of Me
I was in grade 7 when I got my first device. I was so excited. But as I got to school and tried to talk to my friends I just couldn’t get the words out fast enough. I am not a slow thinker, but even with my new device I am a slow talker. (Rebecca)
Imagine getting a voice for the first time as a young person. No wonder Rebecca is excited, likely bubbling full of things to say to her friends with her new wonderful talking machine. Any teenage girl may say I was so excited to tell my friends my exciting news that I couldn’t get the words out fast enough. Indeed, on many occasions I had to ask my own teenage daughter to slow down—I know you’re excited but you are talking so fast I can’t understand you. Yet for Rebecca, due to the imposition of the demands of the device, those words do not flow or bubble out like those of an excited speaking young girl. Despite her quick and excited thoughts, she is rendered “slow.”
What does it mean to be slow? The dictionary definition tells us it means “taking a long time to perform a specified action”; “moving or operating only at a low speed; not quick or fast” (“Slow,” n.d.-a). But slow also has other meanings. To be slow to not be prompt to understand, think, or learn (“Slow,” n.d.-a). Indeed the origins of the word from the Old English slāw had the meaning of being sluggish, torpid, lazy, and dull-witted (“Slow,” n.d.-b”). To be slow is then perhaps understood as something more, something not to do with time itself but to do with the person herself. To speak slowly may send a message that we do not know of what we speak, that we are struggling to get our thoughts out, or perhaps something more.
Even the most unhurried natural speak would speak at a pace that would far outstrip anything that Rebecca could possibly achieve with her shiny new device on that exciting day in Grade 7. Were messages of her capability being conveyed by the sluggishness of talking through a machine? Speaking through a device is slow no matter how quick and lively one’s wit and wits may be, and no matter how excited and motivated one may be to speak. It may be that the speed speaks for itself.
I pretty much just stop talking
At first my friends waited to hear what I had to say, but after a couple of sentences they lost interest and had moved on to something else. I was always behind, or always making them wait for me. Most of the time when I got out what I wanted to say it really didn’t even make sense any more cuz they were three topics ahead of me. So after of few times of that, I pretty much just stopped talking. (Rebecca)
Rebecca was falling behind as her friends moved quickly through the time stream of speaking children—dynamic, shifting, and above all fast-paced. At first they waited, but not for long. For Rebecca, it seemed that they had lost interest, but it may have just been that for them the time to speak had moved on. van den Berg (1970) tells us that time is a strange and wondrous thing. It flies by quickly if we are pressed by a deadline, while it seemingly drags on incessantly if we are waiting expectantly for a loved one to arrive at our door. Time for one using a SGD to talk seems to have this contradictory dimension one might say at the same time. For Rebecca, time is moving quickly, pressuring her to hurry up and get her message out. Yet she is keenly aware that her time demands wait time for others. Of course, this push and pull of time may well be experienced by any of us who feel the need to get a message out quickly. Yet speaking with a SGD seems to render one to always be pressed for time, to always have to have hurried speech, and still there is never quite enough time.
Despite her scrambling to get out what she wanted to say, her delayed comments may have made little sense in the fast-paced flow and quickly changing topics of adolescent speech (Smith, 2005). One can imagine how difficult this might be. Consider what it might be for her friends to be talking animatedly about a perceived slight against them by a teacher, then moving on to a discussion of a new television show that debuted the night before, and then to the cute boy that just walked by. Rebecca finally speaking “That’s pretty stupid” as a comment about the slight of the teacher, might well be greeted with confused looks at best, or misinterpreted at worst, to mean she is making a derogatory comment about her friends taste in boys. Rebecca has spoken, but not in the talk time of her friends. And her message, while not quite lost, may be misunderstood.
A pause of more than 2 s can break the temporal threads of a conversation (Higginbotham & Wilkins, 1999), or perhaps as in Rebecca’s case, extinguish the life of the conversation completely. The temporal demands of the device take precedence, and Rebecca chooses silence to save herself from the perils of being too slow.
Smith (2005) tells of many challenges adolescents who use aided communication encounter, not the least of which is time and timing. She notes that conversations occur with no advance notice, yet they require sophisticated planning, timing, and self-regulation. She also reports that adolescents averaged approximately seven turns per minute of conversation with topics changing frequently, ranging from one to two topic changes per 5-min period, to two topics per minute (p. 71). Recalling that even the fastest SGD users achieve rates of less than 10 words per minute, it is little wonder that Rebecca feels she is pressed, or maybe stressed, by time.
Adolescent social communication takes place largely in conversations, which serve as the glue that holds together cliques and groups (Smith, 2005). Yet given the very real-time challenges it may be that this social glue never gets the opportunity to set. Studies exploring peer interactions between children who speak naturally and children who use SGDs tell of the many challenges in these interactions (Chung et al., 2012). While research into children’s use of SGDs has often focused on issues of intelligibility of the computer-generated speech produced (Drager & Reichle, 2010), it be that what gets in the way of being heard is not the intelligibility of the speech produced but the timing?
What is also apparent across the research is that students who use SGDs are far more likely to be passive in their classroom interactions (Clarke & Wilkinson, 2008). It has been hypothesized that asymmetries observed in interactions between students who use SGDs and others are related to the slow rate of communication aid use (Light, Collier, & Parnes, 1985). Yet, if one were to ask, Rebecca might she say she is talking just as fast as she can?
Talking with a device may put you on the banks of a fast flowing river watching as the stream of conversation flows by. It also may make the people moving effortlessly through the flow of the conversation uncomfortable or anxious as they recognize that you are not one of them. The irony of this experience is remarkable. The very thing that the machine provides—the connection through voice, it also seems to deny—the free flowing ease of human vocal interaction.
Planning to Talk Tomorrow
I mostly don’t talk in class. Sometimes though my teacher will give me a question that she’s going to ask the next day. And then I put my answer in my device that night so that when she asks me the next day I’ll be able to answer. Most of the time this works pretty good. The kids think I’m pretty smart because I have an answer ready when the teacher asks me! (Rachelle)
As we have already heard, it is difficult for children who use devices to enter into the flow of the classroom conversation. It is no wonder, therefore, that most of the time Rachelle does not talk in class. There is no space in the fast flow of time unless of course her teacher acts to open up a space not through slowing down the classroom pace, but by planning ahead so that Rachelle is ready with a timely answer. Rachelle’s teacher has conspired with her to open a space for her to seemingly naturally speak with her device in class. While this script is in fact not much different from sending a child home with a homework assignment to hand in the next day, in this instance Rachelle experiences something more. Her teacher has thought of her specially and acted for her specially.
By setting up this situation, her teacher seems to have stopped time for Rachelle, or at least shifted the time demand. In providing this special affordance of time, she has allowed her speaking success in the classroom, and it seems a moment where Rachelle can shine. By planning to give Rachelle this opening in the time space of the classroom, she can be called upon and can answer that call in a well-timed manner. She can have confidence and trust that she will succeed and everyone will understand that she too is capable. Yet consider what it might be like if this time too slips away?
A race against the clock
One time though it didn’t work so good. We were just starting a new unit on the environment. My teacher told me she was going to ask me the question “what is an example of an ecosystem?” The next day in Science class I was ready. I had looked on the internet and had programmed in my response: “An ecosystem is a community of plants, animals and smaller organisms that live, feed, reproduce and interact in the same area or environment. An example is a fresh water ecosystem where algae, fish, snails all live together in fresh water.” This was probably the longest answer I had ever created on my own. I started to prepare it just after supper, but I was done before bed so that was awesome. But I was soaked in sweat. Mom said I couldn’t go to bed like that all sweaty, but I didn’t care. I was so excited to tell Miss R my great answer! (Rachelle)
In experiencing the belief that her teacher has placed in her, Rachelle has literally worked herself into a sweat to make sure she has an answer worthy of her teacher’s trust. It is really not such a long answer, a mere 40 words. But those 40 words took her more than 2 hr to compose. First, like most North American children in the 21st century, Rachelle gathered the answer to her questions from the Internet. Also, like most children, she needed to transform that information into the answer to the question that her teacher posed. For a speaking child, this might be as quick as jotting down a few notes so that when called upon she should recall the answer. For a child who must enter her speaking notes, or more correctly her complete speech, into her device the task is not quick and does not involve a few notes to jog one’s memory. It involves the slow, and apparently laborious, process of finding, then entering the words to be spoken into the machine. For Rachelle, though, the sweat and toil seems worth it, that is, until the appointed time gets swallowed up by unexpected changes in the flow of the class.
All class I was waiting for my teacher to ask me the question that I had prepared the answer for last night. It was hard for me to pay attention to what she was saying because I was actually just listening for my question. As it turned out, the other kids started asking questions about other stuff that day. So Miss R ended up talking about that, but not the stuff that I had the answer for. It was almost the end of class when she glanced over at me. Her wide-eyed look told me that she had just remembered our plan. Just as she seemed to be going to say something the bell rang. As the students got up to leave she came over. Rachelle I am sorry, can we do the question next class? I nodded and smiled but as I wheeled out of class I had to hide my face as my smile turned into angry tears.
To have an answer to a question that you hope a teacher might ask may be a memory of anyone’s experience of school. I hope she asks me about the Canadian Shield we might think if we had done our assigned readings the night before, or maybe more so if we had only done part of the readings—the chapter on the Canadian Shield. If the question is not asked, we may also feel disappointed that we have not been able to show ourselves to our teacher and our classmates as clever or perhaps as diligent in our studies. But our disappointment may well be expressed with a mere shrug of the shoulders knowing full well that before very long we will again have the opportunity to raise our hand and speak of things we know or at least believe we do.
We may also have experienced a time in class when we were to prepare something to share with the class in the manner that Gabby has been afforded. In our case, this might be called a presentation. I can well recall my time as a school student, waiting my turn to give a presentation to the class, but strangely for me a presentation was an anxiety-provoking experience at school. I would wait my turn, not unlike Rachelle, but not with anticipation, but with dread. While I loved being the one to have an answer, I loathed being the one who had to stand up and give a speech. For Rachelle, it seems the later experience may be the only one she can have. While she may indeed have an answer in the moment, the moment may fly by too quickly for her to chime in with her SGD. It seems anxiety for Rachelle results not from being called upon to speak her answer to the class, but from the ever present threat that time may slip away and she will once again be unheard and unnoticed.
What might it be like to be listening so hard for the one question you can answer that you cannot pay any attention at all to the rest of the conversation? Is this distraction? In some ways it clearly seems so. Rachelle is so distracted by her desire to seize the moment and give a well-spoken answer that she finds it hard to attend to her teacher’s talk. Yet she is listening intently for the question she knows she can answer—for the instant where she can jump successfully into the class discourse. What might Rachelle be missing by planning to talk and waiting for the plan to unfold? Other children may be listening intently too, and perhaps for their chance to chime in with a response. They are listening for ideas that they can speak to in the moment, not a particular cue to speak.
As stated so eloquently by Bob Williams (2000), a SGD user himself, “the silence of speechlessness is never golden” (p. 248). Clearly for Gabby the silence imposed by the voices of her classmates was not golden but heartbreaking. As anyone who has been in a classroom knows, topics of conversation may go in many directions. A classroom full of students with their own answers, and often their own questions, may call upon a teacher to seize the moment and discuss something she had not planned. A comment or question from a student may cause her to veer from her plans for the day and talk about something she understands will be instructive or meaningful, though it was not on her agenda to do so. Such is the way of speech; it can move quickly in many directions. That is of course if you can speak! For Rachelle, veering off course meant that was she once again not fast enough to dip into the flow of the conversation. Even with the promise that she will be called upon to talk tomorrow, burning tears of frustration brim to her eyes. All her prepared work to talk, to be heard with a timely answer to a challenging question, disappeared as the clock on the wall says it is time to move on, and who can ever tell if there will really be time tomorrow.
The silence of one who cannot speak naturally may not be a chosen silence, but an imposed one. Merleau-Ponty (2005) suggests “one keeps silence only when one can speak” (p. 187). And it appears speak in a timely manner. Again we hear that when speaking with a device, it seems that time itself is silencing. The expectations of timely retorts, the ever so real demands to speak in a given window of time, the constant lack of time imposed by the constraints of the classroom may all serve to disallow one who speaks with a device not only the choice to speak but in a very true sense it seems also the choice of silence.
Text Time
I am chatting with Tim online. In Facebook messenger. I am not sure if he is entering his text using his SGD or via keyboard. I think to ask him but then get engaged in our conversation. I type a question into the message window: do you remember any particular times when you used your device when you weren’t at school? Hitting the return key sends my question to him. I then turn my attention to my Facebook page to see if there is anything of interest. Ping, the message comes “I used my v at Stampede” ‘any good stories for me?” I type in. After hitting return I go and get a soda from the fridge. His response is waiting for me “now I go vecoa every day” Okay I think he doesn’t want to talk about Stampede, this is something else. “What’s that?” I ask. After a few more exchanges that are interspersed with my checking email and Facebook messages I learn that he is attending a new day program. “That’s exciting” I say! We go on to chat about a few more things before I realize what time it is and that I better say goodnight. We agree to talk again soon. I can’t help but think this is one of the best conversations I have ever had with Tim.
Tim and I are engaging in a conversation, albeit a very different conversation than would be possible if we were face to face. I can type in a question for him with little to no expectation as to how long it might take him to respond. In fact, I readily turn my attention elsewhere knowing that it will take time, perhaps a long time, before I hear the ping of Facebook messenger telling me Tim has replied.
Chatting with Facebook messenger seems to allow a different kind of communication time, text time. Not the face-to-face conversation between a device user and a speaking person, but a technologically mediated conversation in which the issue of time and timing seems to loosen its pull. There is no urgency to respond, in fact no expectation that a response will come in any particular time frame. When a person who is using a SGD is conversing with others, they are usually the only ones who are interacting in a technologically mediated manner. But when having an online conversation this is different. Both Tim and I are interacting in a mediated fashion. We are both using some technological methods to enter text to converse with each other. This mutual technological mediation appears to create a new temporal opening for a conversation, one where the time constraints of talk time no longer apply. A conversational time space where time is allowed, time can be taken, and conversations can be interrupted without creating uncomfortable silences or broken conversations. Perhaps through this jointly mediated experience, Tim and I have found what Clark (1996) calls “common ground” (as cited in Higginbotham & Caves, 2002).
It is little wonder that the young people who use SGDs often prefer to communicate with me via text or Facebook (Shane, Blackstone, Vanderheiden, Williams, & DeRuyter, 2012). With these text-based modes, they have entered into a new experience of time, one where their device may indeed fade from notice. As text time takes over from talk time does it may be possible that time slows down. A pause, even a lengthy pause is expected. There are no longer broken conversations, only asynchronous ones where it seems talk time has slowed to whatever pace one chooses, or perhaps even the pace one needs.
Implications for Practice
The purpose of this article is to provide insights into the real demands of time placed upon young people who speak through SGDs. By doing so, it is hoped that the speaking people who are supporting them, interacting with them, and teaching them may come to a clearer understanding of the lived experience of time. Clearly speaking through a SGD is not like the kind of speaking we as speaking persons take for granted. Yet we are often exposed not to the reality of the experience but to the experience as played out when we are privy to edited conversational time or when we hear people with SGDs give speeches. These constructed experiences may lead those of us who support children and youth with complex communication needs to make assumptions about speaking with SGDs that no one, not even the most competent SGD user could ever fulfill, not because they are incapable, but because the technology is. As Higginbotham and Caves (2002) state,
Although people use AAC devices for real-time conversations, these technologies have not been designed to meet the temporal and interactive demands associated with face-to-face conversation. (p. 46)
There is not, as of yet, any technology that can come close to allowing a person with complex communication needs to meet the expectations and demands of talk time. Until a technology is created that can transform thought held in a person’s brain directly to speech (Venkatagiri, 2010), people who use SGDs will always be out of synch with the talk time that rules that govern human conversation expect. That is, we have seen, unless they are afforded the now perhaps not uncommon time of text conversation. To be sure, one who speaks through an SGD must text to talk.
Perhaps it is not technology that is needed for young people with complex communication needs to speak, but it is time. Time needs to be given so they can construct the messages they are so desperately trying to convey quickly enough to be heard. Time needs to be taken to listen to their words and phrases and complete sentences. While listening to bits and pieces of their message may suffice on occasion, it is important they are sometimes afforded the opportunity to speak in full sentences like other children learning language. Without this time to speak in grammatical sentences, their language development may in fact be delayed or fail to develop to the degree to which they are capable (Lund & Light, 2003). While the technology allows them to show us what they know through speech, without being given the time they need to talk to and with us, may important benefits of school time be at risk? As Cazden (2001) tells us, “while other institutions such as hospitals, serve their clients in nonlinguistic ways, the basic purpose of school is achieved through communication” (p. 2), communication that is primarily done through speech.
In today’s classrooms, students commonly carry their electronic devices, and most seem to engage in texting with one another, sometimes at the cost of actually talking with one another (Turkle, 2011). Might this be one answer to the question of how we can shape time? Can we allow our students with SGDs to talk, not by making them enter into our talk time, but rather by demanding of ourselves and other children that we enter into their conversational time, text time? Many educators are moving to online, asynchronous environments. Many more are also using chat forums to provide a text-based modality for students to have, as they are referred to, backline chats in the classroom. Recent research lauds such classroom modalities as they “allow time for in-depth reflection- students have more time to reflect, research & compose their thoughts before participating in the discussion” (TeacherStream, 2009). Will the technologically mediated classroom create a type of common ground that Higginbotham and Caves (2002) tell us is needed in human communicative interactions? Alternatively, will the affordance of text time, give young people who communicate with SGDs common ground at least some of the time?
As educators, among the most important things we are asked to do is to take the time, give the time, and find the time to let every child be heard. Can greater understanding of lived time for students who use SGDs help us change the tempo of our conversations? Can we embrace rhythms that slow down at least long enough to recognize that it may well be the demands of time that silence our children? My hope is that this use of phenomenological methods may evoke a call—a call to make time, take time, and perhaps even to try and shape time so that every child make be given the gift of time to be heard.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.