title: Brevity and speed of message delivery trade-offs in augmentative and alternative communication.
abstract: This study is the third in a series of studies that have concentrated on utterance-based systems--which allow the relatively quick selection of full sentences--and investigated trade-offs faced by users of such systems when there is a pragmatic mismatch between the prestored sentence and the current discourse context. While the previous studies focused on trade-offs between speed of message delivery and either relevance or informativeness, this study investigated the effects of trade-offs between speed of message delivery and brevity on public attitudes. Participating were 96 sales clerks who viewed scripted, videotaped trade-off message conditions in the context of a bookstore interaction and completed a questionnaire designed to assess their attitudes toward customers who used utterance-based systems and his or her communication. Significantly higher mean ratings were found for the trade-off condition involving the quickly delivered message with repetition when compared to each of the slowly delivered, non-repetitive message conditions (i.e., with and without a preceding conversational floorholder). Implications regarding the model of conversational trade-off choices and its technological applications are discussed.
authors.affiliation: University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA. mccoy@cis.udel.edu <mccoy@cis.udel.edu>
authors.forename: Kathleen F
authors.initials: KF
authors.lastname: McCoy
authors.forename: Jan L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Bedrosian
authors.forename: Linda A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Hoag
authors.forename: Dallas E
authors.initials: DE
authors.lastname: Johnson
mesh_terms: D000203:Activities of Daily Living; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001290:Attitude; D003142:Communication; D003143:Communication Devices for People with Disabilities / Q000523:psychology*; D006233:Persons with Disabilities / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009790:Occupations; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D012919:Social Behavior; D013060:Speech; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires