Conversational repair was examined in videotaped samples of spontaneous mealtime talk of 6 normal elderly adults, 5 subjects with early stage dementia of the Alzheimer's type (EDAT) and 5 subjects with middle stage DAT (MDAT) with a family member who acted as a conversational partner. The overall percentage of utterances involved in communication breakdown and repair and the specific proportions of utterances related to conversation problems, signals identifying problems, and repairs, were evaluated. Using the normal dyads as a control group, results showed the differential effects of DAT onset and progression on the conversational repair behavior of both subjects with DAT and their conversational partner. The percentage of conversation involved in repair was significantly higher for MDAT versus control and EDAT dyads. Despite the increase of conversational troubles with DAT onset and progression, the difficulties were repaired successfully the majority of the time. Subjects with EDAT produced more requests for repair than did their conversational partners. However, conversational partners of EDAT subjects used more elaboration repairs than did EDAT subjects. The opposite pattern was observed in the MDAT group where subjects with MDAT created and repaired more conversational problems than did their conversational partner. MDAT subjects produced more discourse trouble sources than did EDAT subjects. It was also observed that MDAT subjects and conversational partners frequently used nonspecific terms to signal misunderstandings. The findings have important implications for developing family caregiver communication enhancement strategies that are specific to the clinical stage of DAT.
| Many persons with disabilities lack the ne motor coordination necessary to operate traditional keyboards. For these individuals, ambiguous or reduced keyboards offer an alternative access method. By placing multiple characters on each k ey, the size and accessibility of the individual keys can be enhanced without requiring a larger keyboard. Using statistical disambiguation algorithms to automatically interpret each keystroke, these systems can approach the keystroke e ciency keystrokes per character of conventional keyboards. Since the placement o f c haracters on each key determines the e ectiveness of these algorithms, several methods of optimizing keyboard arrangements have previously been proposed. This paper presents a new method for optimizing an arbitrary set of N characters over a collection of M keys. While earlier e orts relied upon approximations of keystroke eciency, the proposed approach optimizes the arrangement under this exact performance measure. Applied to the canonical 26 characters on 9 key telephone keypad" problem, this method provides an improvement in e ciency of 2.5 percentage points over previously established layouts. Using only a minimum of calculations, the proposed technique operates quickly and e ciently, deriving optimal arrangements in a matter of seconds using a personal computer. The exible method is applicable to arbitrary disambiguation algorithms, character sets, and languages. Keywords| A m biguous keyboard, reduced keyboard, disambiguation, character prediction
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