Peter

Peter is a 18 year old student at a school for students with disabilities. Just like the other participants he has cerebral palsy and has never been able to speak. Peter communicates through a low-tech Bliss board where he points to the Bliss signs with a laser pointer attached to his glasses. He also uses a VOCA with dynamic screens and the software Mind Express with a Bliss vocabulary and also several phrases regarding his big interest, sports. To access the computer Peter uses a head mouse and the software Dragger™^xxvii, which lets him use auto click but also gives him access to right-clicking, double-clicking and dragging. Peter knows all the letters and can use an on-screen keyboard, but he can not read or write, although he usually knows the first letters of words and names, and can use this together with his Bliss signs. Peter’s vocabulary in Mind Express has the same basic structure as John’s, individualised with pages about his favourite sports and players.

To construct phrases and sentences with his Bliss signs he has to go about it the same way that John does, and select the words from different pages.

We are going to start with looking at a small part of the interview about Peter’s shopping habits, and then continue with a conversation with a friend about sports. 

3.5.1 Interview about shopping habits 

Peter was interviewed in his home, without any parents or assistants present. A transcription of a part of this interview is displayed in Appendix A. Here we are just going to take a look at two of Peter’s expressions.

When asked about how he went about his shopping he answered, selecting word by word from his Bliss vocabulary: “SKOLA NÄR SLUTAR FÖR DAG (SCHOOL WHEN

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FINISH FOR DAY)”. When asked if he drives his electric wheelchair himself, he answered “IBLAND NÄR KROPP MOTSATSEN TILL STARK KÖRA SJÄLV (SOMETIMES WHEN BODY OPPOSIT OF STRONG DRIVE MYSELF)”.

In the example from the interview with Peter there are many similarities with the one with John; not surprising since their vocabularies and access modes were almost the same. There are some differences in the two examples. Peter seemed to favour slightly longer phrases. In this short example he created one phrase with eight words, one with five and two with four words. However, he seemed to worry less about word order than John. Maybe this is due to a stronger inclination towards the syntax of Blissymbolics.

Both men had for a long time been using their low-tech Bliss boards and had probably been taught to start with pointing to the most important sign before elaborating and specifying the meaning. The phrase “SCHOOL WHEN FINISH FOR DAY” may well be an example of this. The grammatically correct word order for Swedish is in this case the same as that for English: “When school has finished for the day” (När skolan har slutat/är slut för dagen). But with the syntax of Blissymbolics in mind, “school” is the evident fixation point around which the rest of the phrase turns, and the interviewer had no problem understanding what Peter meant.

Another example of Blissymbolics’ syntax was the use of “opposite of”. This is an important device that is placed on the Bliss board in order to save space and to make it possible for the user to be less restricted by the limited number of the signs/words on the Bliss board. With Peter’s use of “opposite of strong” we learn a number of things:

1. It is obvious that Peter lacked the words “tense” and “relaxed”. Instead he used the word closest to what he meant.

2. He showed us that he was an experienced user of Blissymbolics, who was used to inventing ways of getting his message through, with the devices at his disposal.

3. On a low-tech Bliss board, the meaning would have been negotiated with the interlocutor, once he had selected the Bliss signs, something like: “I: Opposite of strong. When you are not tense?” On a device with dynamic displays, especially with the software Mind Express that Peter is using, it would have been possible to make the VOCA automatically speak a word that is opposite to the one selected.

In this way “opposite of strong” could have been spoken by the VOCA as

“weak”, “opposite of long” could have been spoken as “short” etc. Peter’s vocabulary was not set to do that – which in a way was fortunate, because this way it was possible to hear what he was doing.

3.5.2 Conversation about sports 

Just like David and Lisa, Peter chose to record a conversation with a friend. The interaction was similar to that with David, in that the conversation took place in Peter’s

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pain”, 50 seconds to say “look at L always pain”, including letting the speech synthesis speak the complete message. The following utterance took 1.2 minutes: “he can sit help bad boss”, and “AIK boss before first for two years with bosses” takes 1.8 minutes. This last expression was quite incomprehensible for someone who did not know what it was all about, but S immediately understood what Peter was getting at and responded “he was boss there for two years before”.

It is evident from the way the two interlocutors picked up on each other’s contributions that they both knew very much about the subject and that it was not the first time they were engaged in this kind of conversation. From the way that they smiled, laughed and looked at each other it feels safe to conclude that they were both having a good time. It was also obvious that S was sometimes teasing or trying to provoke Peter, like when he commented that the player they were talking about should become a ball boy in the upcoming soccer game. This joke was not lost on Peter, who first smiled with his whole face during a moment of mutual eye gaze and then started to laugh out loud. Other times S took on a more lecturing role, being older and more experienced than Peter, but also then in a way as to provoke Peter into contradicting him or in other ways express his opinion, which Peter also did. All in all it seems like there was a raw but cordial atmosphere, with a bit of mockery and provocations from both sides.