Augmentative communication systems taught to cerebral-palsied children--a longitudinal study. II. Pragmatic features of sign and symbol use.

Pragmatic analysis of the sign and symbol utterances produced by 40 language-impaired, cerebral-palsied children in semi-structured conversational settings revealed severe restrictions in the range of communicative functions that were used. The children were able to communicate certain conversational acts effectively, but over 80% of all utterances expressed just four communicative functions. There were also some significant gaps, with certain functions not being used at all. The children's progress was followed up at 6-month intervals over a period of 1 1/2 years. Few changes were found in the range and relative frequencies of communicative functions expressed over time. There were few significant differences between the symbol and sign users on these measures, which suggests that overall neither augmentative mode facilitated greater communicative use than the other.