Aim: Children with complex communication needs (CCNs) need a range of communication options to participate in social interactions. There is a need to provide effective communication access for children with CCNs (Ibrahim et al., 2024), one of which is through multimodal interventions. Multimodality is a key element of human interactions that characterizes the combination of various semiotic resources in communicative events, such as speech, gesture, body movements, and/or proxemics (Adami, 2016). The use of multiple communicative modes in interactions with children with CCNs helps establish common ground, the state where both parties have reached a mutual understanding of their joint attention to a topic, idea, or object (Ibrahim et al., 2024). The purposes of this study are to document: (1) how common ground is negotiated and established through the interactive arrangement of multimodal communicative resources; and (2) how photos mediate multimodal communication.
Method: The participants are a child with CCN and two student clinicians (ethical approval obtained). Video recordings of therapy sessions at a university clinic in 2023 were reviewed and analyzed using multimodal discourse analysis (Norris, 2004). Instances where the child and clinicians are jointly looking at and talking about photos from either an album or an iPad were selected for analysis. These photos, collected and provided by the child’s family, showcase past episodic events, objects, and people significant to the child. Data transcription followed the hybrid two-stage approach (Doak, 2019), which combines a multimodal transcription following guidelines by Norris (2004), supported by annotated video stills to capture subtle communicative resources.
Results: The preliminary data analysis process has provided some informative preliminary findings that reveal how multiple communication modalities (e.g., gestures, gaze, body movements) are recognized and negotiated between the child and clinicians to achieve mutual understanding of the topic suggested by the photos. These findings support existing research that encourages professionals to value multimodal communication strategies and use them strategically to promote the autonomy and engagement of individuals with CCNs. In addition, by focusing on interactions mediated by photographs, an accessible artifact in daily life, the study identifies their functions as both a visual aid that guides the conversation flow and a communicative resource woven into an embodied participation framework (Goodwin, 2007). This suggests future directions for professionals and/or researchers to further explore the role(s) of photographs in scaffolding aided communication, especially in low-resource settings where dedicated high-tech communication devices are less available.
Conclusion: This study provides empirical evidence on the use of multimodal assemblage in photo-mediated interactions involving a child with CCNs. Through examples analyzed in this study, clinicians and other adult communication partners can discover how to identify, acknowledge, and respond to multimodal expressions to achieve common ground with children with CCNs in social interactions.
