Episode 280: Recast: Chris Klein: The Importance of Motor Planning

In this “Recast” episode of Talking with Tech, we share a remastered episode that was previously aired on the podcast. This episode includes Chris Bugaj’s interview with Chris Klein, a full time AAC user, disability advocate, and mentor. They discuss Chris Klein’s presentation at ATIA about motor planning and the “external lexicon” of AAC users.

Before the interview, Chris Bugaj, Rachel Madel, and Lucas Steuber discuss some of their thoughts about motor planning and what they have seen in their practice that supports the need for motor planning in robust AAC systems.

Key ideas this episode:

🔑 Chris Klein advocates for the largest vocabulary possible at the start to begin developing a motor plan with their AAC as soon as possible. It is important to consider a user’s motor plan long term. If you give them 8 buttons to start, you will need to keep expanding the page, which changes the motor plan around. It’s better to start AAC users on a larger grid size at the start so we aren’t constantly changing the buttons around.

🔑 Chris Klein shares that people who use AAC have both an internal lexicon (words in their head) and an external lexicon (whatever AAC device a user has in front of them). An AAC user’s layout must be well thought out in advance, because if there is no motor plan and looking for a button takes too long, the aac user may forget what they wanted to say or will otherwise limit their utterances. This could potentially slow down language development overall.

🔑 For the most part, Chris Klein believes that goals for AAC users are set too low. The goal should be learning to use language spontaneously, not just communicating basic needs and wants.