7、Talking iPads and the Partial Promise of Voice

Talking iPads and the Partial Promise of Voice

Voice as Performative

Parents view voice as a means for their children to perform identity, which is shaped through interactions with the environment. The synthetic speech generated by the iPad and Proloquo2Go is related to four aspects of identity performance: sounding one’s age, sounding human, sounding related to one’s family members, and sounding of one’s cultural background.

Age

Many parents want their children to have a synthetic voice that matches their maturation level. For example, Alice didn’t want Danny to have an adult male voice as it would be odd. Esosa initially had an issue with Chike’s school setting his voice to an adult man in Proloquo2Go and later chose a child voice. Donna