Aided conversations differ from spoken ones in their transitions between turns and symbols because seeking and choosing symbols takes more time than speaking words naturally. This study adopted the concepts and principles of conversation analysis (CA) to analyze the transitions between symbols during the construction of aided turns. The data was…

A study involving 12 students (7 to 20 years old) was conducted to show that a population, classified as trainable mentally retarded, in a non-institutionalized, non-residential public school setting could learn to use the Blissymbolics system to "talk" by pointing to the appropriate symbol. In the 3 months of the project's initial…