A few well-chosen words

Ten professionals (five speech pathologists, three rehabilitation counsellors, and two teachers) participated in a survey to investigate their ability to predict the topics and vocabulary of meal-break conversations at work. Participants selected two topics that they thought were likely to occur during meal-break conversations between nondisabled employees for each day of the week. They selected five key words appropriate to each chosen topic. The topics and key words were analyzed for frequency and commonality and compared to the topics and vocabulary from actual meal-break conversations in the workplace. The professionals accurately predicted some topics that occurred in the actual conversational sample. However, one-third of the key words (33%) predicted by the participants did not occur in the conversational sample. The implications of these findings for vocabulary selection for augmented communicators are discussed.