AMANDA HYNAN FINAL THESIS PDF

suggested by Balandin (2002) to replace ‘severe communication impairments’. In
their 2011 paper, von Tetzchner and Basil (2011) describe how the term ‘complex
communication needs’ has been widely adopted within the AAC literature base but
feel despite being well intentioned it is rather vague. They also outline the variety of
terms used to describe how people use AAC such as: ‘people who use augmentative
and alternative communication’, ‘aided communicator’, ‘aided speaker’ and ‘AAC
user’ which philosophically attempt to capture what a person can do.
Within this study, I will use ‘people with physical disabilities’, ‘people with complex
communication needs’ and ‘people who use augmentative and alternative
communication’ or ‘people who use AAC’ as well as occasionally ‘AAC users’. I
have a sympathetic view towards the political and philosophical British social model
stance of ‘physically disabled people’, but wish to maintain consistency with the field
of AAC and put people first across both physical and communication descriptions. I
am using the term ‘complex communication needs’ as it is not the intention of this
study to define individual communication impairment, however, within the participant
information section it was deemed useful to offer a broad description of the degree of
physical and communicative impairment. In order to respect the stance of quoted or
discussed authors then ‘disabled people’ may be used if it is clear that this is their
preferred term.
Finally, I will use the term ‘young people’ as this acknowledges the adolescent/young
adult threshold that is crossed by this study (age range 14 to 24 years) and fits with
how the participants primarily view themselves. My main interest is in capturing the
views of the young people on the topic area but in order to contextualise and coconstruct
these views it is sometimes necessary to describe the physical and
communicative issues that challenge and support them.
19