Analysis of the Communicative and Linguistic Functions of some Alternative and Augmentative Communication Software for the Italian Language

CAA supports communicative interactions, and its use enables communicative exchanges. Some research has shown that people who use AAC have difficulties mastering the rules and conventions of the language (Binger et al., 2011). Few studies have investigated language development in AAC users: it is, therefore, urgent to reflect on whether and how AAC systems support communication at a pragmatic and semantic level and allow users to be exposed to correct and complex linguistic input. Selecting different language components and identifying their diversity of word class and syntax, morphology, and grammar re-quires AAC developers to have «an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the underlying grammar structure language, as well as typical age and development path in which specific words and linguistic structures are found acquired and used» (Soto & Cooper, 2021:7). This paper intends to compare some AAC soft-ware tools developed for the Italian language at a double level, pragmatic/semantic and morphological/syntactic, using an analysis tool specifically developed for the Italian language and based on the Graphic Symbol Utterance and Sentence Development Framework (Binger et al., 2020). The comparison of AAC software shows that they allow and facilitate communicative exchange, but as the complexity of the linguistic components increases, several limitations emerge.