JCPSLP Vol 21 No 3 2019

Multimodal communication

Improving the ideas behind multimodal communication Scott Barnes

Our society is biased towards communicating with spoken and written language. This has a profound effect on how we all think about communication, and the role of language in it. The idea of “multimodal communication” has been useful for highlighting issues of communication access, but its value as a technical, professional concept is questionable. I argue that we can improve the ideas supporting multimodal communication and transform it into a technical concept by carefully reflecting on the presumptions of our profession, the nature of communication, and nature and functions of the modalities used for communication. As a starting point, we should relate core aspects of communication to different meaning-making modalities, and consider how modalities are combined to achieve communicative acts. In the longer term, this reconceptualisation will provide a basis for more targeted assessment, intervention, and advocacy for people with communication disorders. O ur society is biased towards communicating with spoken and written language. The default expectation that people can understand and use language has a profound effect on how we all think about communication, and the role of language in it. Speech pathologists are mindful of language-based communication expectations, and have a strong sense of how disruptions to understanding, speaking, reading, and writing can limit societal participation. The notion of “multimodal communication” is one of the ways that our profession has responded to these expectations and their implications for people with communication disorders. Our current formulation of multimodal communication provides a basis for articulating how people with reduced access to language can be supported to participate in communication and society. It also provides a basis for advocacy focused on their communication needs. Multimodal communication has therefore been valuable for highlighting common experiences of people with communication disorders, and for defining a politics of communication access. Its value

as a technical concept or construct, however, is more questionable. The way we currently talk about multimodal communication implies a contrast with other ‘forms’ of communication – a “unimodal” communication; or, more realistically, communication that is primarily carried out using spoken language. This is troublesome because – as I will discuss in the sections to follow – spoken language is always embedded in situations that are multimodal (see, e.g., Mondada, 2019). To de-emphasise this fact – explicitly or implicitly – misses the very nature of communication, and risks distorting how we view communication situations involving people with communication disorders. Multimodal communication, does, however, encapsulate an important truth: when people are face to face and communicating, there are multiple, converging streams of behaviour that generate communicative moments. If we are to retain multimodal communication as a platform for speech pathology practice with communication disorders (i.e., use it as more than a basis for advocacy), we must take on the challenge of transforming it into a technical concept by establishing its theoretical and empirical footing (see also Pierce, O’Halloran, Togher, and Rose, 2019). I will argue that this requires careful reflection on the presumptions of our profession, the nature of communication, and nature and functions of the ‘multiple modalities’ in question. Language “bias” People have tacit expectations about the use of language. These expectations become visible in, for example, the joy our clients and their families express upon the successful production of a troublesome sound, word, or sentence. They also manifest in specific expectations about communicating through language. For example, a parent may pursue a child saying the word “hello” to an adult, or the words “I’m sorry” to a sibling. In institutional contexts, uttering certain words at certain times is compulsory for the communication situation, and has life-changing implications (e.g., saying “I do” or “I plead guilty”) (Enfield, 2013, p. 16). So, language is afforded a ‘privileged’ status as a method of accomplishing communicative acts in every part of society. Professional disciplines also have (more and less explicit) assumptions and perspectives on language that shape how they approach it. In general, the disciplinary roots and professional tasks of speech pathology have encouraged us to think about language as separable from communication. For instance, diagnosis of a

KEYWORDS MULTIMODAL COMMUNICATION THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN PEER- REVIEWED

Scott Barnes

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JCPSLP Volume 21, Number 3 2019

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