Key word signing Key word signing Key word signing is a technique of simultaneous communication whereby the communication partner of the user will use both natural speech and also produce signs for the words that carry the most important information. Key word signing puts emphasis on the pertinent words in a sentence or a phrase, rather than signing every word like you would for American Sign Language (ASL). For example, if someone said, "Go wash your hands" the key words that would be signed would be "wash" and "hand". Key word signing is a form of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) that uses
Augmentative and alternative communication Rate enhancement strategies can increase the user's rate of output to around 12–15 words per minute, and as a result enhance the efficiency of communication. There are two main options for increasing the rate of communication: encoding and prediction. Encoding is a technique permitting an AAC user to produce an entire word, sentence or phrase using only one or two activations of their AAC system. In numeric, alpha-numeric, and letter encoding (also known as abbreviation-expansion), words and sentences are coded as sequences of letters and numbers. For example, typing "HH" may retrieve "Hello, how are you?". In iconic encoding strategies,