In attempting to devise a tailored AAC device organization and customized literacy training program it is important to know about the daily life experiences and interests of students. This can be extremely difficult to determine for children with profound physical, cognitive and/or social problems. In our presentation we discuss how this problem has been approached at the Bridge School using a regular feature of program, namely the regular sharing of ‘Home News’. Independent of ability levels, all students share their news in the same way, through the use of a Step-by-Step Communicator. In preparation for ‘Home News’, a student’s parent or other family member or carer records the relevant news that the student will share into the communicator. The Bridge School has been collecting digital recordings of the home news for selected students over the course of many months, and using this data to document the experiences and topics of interest that are recorded for the student. The recordings also give a sense of the language and communication patterns that students are exposed to at home (their family ‘dialect’ if you will). These data are transcribed and create a data set which can be manipulated using various corpus linguistic tools to identify recurrent constructions, key words, important topics and so on. We discuss how the output of such analyses are used as the input for personalized AAC development and, where relevant, literacy development.
