The semiotics of aided language development

Some children fail to develop speech due to motor impairments, and have to use graphic symbols on communication aids to express themselves. Young aided communicators typically hear and produce different language forms. The adults’ child-directed language hence has a different form from the child’s utterances and their expansions of the child’s utterances tend to contain many linguistic elements that the children are unable to construct and produce. Reading and writing typically develop late in children who lack speech, and sometimes remain limited. The small graphic vocabulary of young aided communicators implies that they often have to rely on unusual and untaught ways of constructing meaning. The semiotics of their expressive communication appears to be a blend of the spoken language they hear, the graphic representations of the communication system they use, and the strategies they use to construct the expressions. Young aided communicators may show significant achievements, even when the language environment gives poor constructive support. This atypical form of language development may shed light on the children’s language situation and on language and semiotics in general.