“Dead.”
My husband and I looked up, startled, to where Lina sat at the kitchen table with her tablet. “Dead,” the app repeated, as Lina pressed a symbol again and again, entranced. “Dead.” Pause. “Dead.” Pause. “Dead.” Pause. Then altogether at once, “Dead-dead-dead-dead-dead.”
It wasn’t the latest adventure game. Lina was learning to speak through an AAC app, and she was freaking us out in the process.
For those unfamiliar, “AAC” stands for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (which, ironically, is a mouthful and hard to say, just like “monosyllabic” is way too long of a word). It can cover a wide range of different types of communication. In this case, Lina was using her tablet to speak.
Some of her most popular words appeared on her home screen of her AAC app. Simple, innocuous things like, “movie,” “music,” “scrambled eggs,” and “potty.” For a couple of weeks, she had been fully absorbed by that screen and happy to hit its buttons. I was thrilled when she used it one day after dinner to tell me she was “all done,” and when I asked if she wanted to go play marble run, she responded, “Yes.” To hear my child say “yes” for the first time was beyond thrilling. In fact, I was over the moon with joy that my little angel was learning to use her voice.
And now, from her innocent perch on her booster seat, my little angel used that voice to intone, “Dead-dead-dead-dead-dead.” She swiveled around to beam at us over her shoulder, her beatific smile belied by her words. We wrung our hands and wondered what it meant.
After a minute’s investigation, we learned it meant she had maneuvered her way from the home screen into several sub-folders and was exploring the further capacity of her AAC app. Once we understood her resourcefulness, we realized it was pretty fantastic and followed her experiments with interest.
Some of the app’s options were banal. The folders for food, verbs, and places contained the basics one might expect. She didn’t spend much time with them – just enough to orient herself.
More interesting to Lina were the words that made mommy and daddy go, “Say what now?” And Lina understood exactly what she was saying. For example, one folder was devoted solely to negative adjectives. We spent several minutes listening to her espouse the view that some (unknown) substance was not only “disgusting,” but also “awful” and “miserable.” And not only “disgusting,” “awful,” and “miserable,” but also “awful-awful-awful-disgusting-miserable-miserable-awful-disgusting.”
To get the full flavor of these conversations, I should tell you a little bit more about how her app works. Lina presses a button for each word in her phrase, then presses the phrase for a full and complete recitation. And unlike my previous impression of communication devices as halting, robotic drones, this app speaks with a little girl’s voice, and it speaks FAST. There are pauses as Lina builds her thought and transitions from one word to another, but once she tells the app to speak the entire phrase, it wastes no time. Hence, “awful,” pause, “awful,” pause, “awful,” becomes “awful-awful-awful” in a sweet but firm child-like tone. It’s impactful to be honest, and I felt a bit insulted for no reason whatsoever.
She then wandered over to the folder for feelings, which again seemed largely negative. “Angry-angry-angry-angry-angry-thirsty-angry,” she told us, while giggling and holding a full cup of milk. Although I kept an open mind, I began to question her sincerity. “Angry,” she insisted, big smile on her face. “Angry.”
But it wasn’t all bad. After her expression of various pessimistic opinions, she somehow managed to find a folder labeled, “Holidays.” Once in the folder, she had a few things to say about Christmas ornaments, Santa, and Christmas trees, which were interesting in June, but she quickly moved on to a different holiday, where she paused and lingered.
“Father’s Day,” she said to Ryan. “What was that?” he asked, caught in the middle of wiping crumbs from the kitchen table. “Father’s Day,” she repeated. “Father’s Day.”
“Lina, are you saying Father’s Day?”
Pause. “Father’s Day.” Pause. “Father’s Day-Father’s Day-Father’s Day-Father’s Day.”
I neglected to mention that this experimentation took place last Sunday, on what happened to be Father’s Day. We had spent time that morning wishing Ryan and the grandfathers a happy Father’s Day, and Lina had been listening, and she 100% knew what she was saying to her daddy.
“Lina, thank you!” Ryan said, giving her a big hug.
She smiled and found her tablet to respond.
“Angry.”
“Is that so.”
“Dead.”
“Okay Lina.”
We were so proud.
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