Communication Channels & Modality

Abstractions about how communication is carried and matched across sensory and technological channels — richness-to-task matching (media richness, media synchronicity, channel richness), multimodal integration (McGurk effect, nonverbal communication, social presence), and channel-dependent access (AAC, perceivable design, expressive and receptive language).

11 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) — Support or replace failing speech not by handing over a device but by running a clinical pathway — assess residual capability across four channels, match a modality to it, design a core vocabulary, train the communication partners, and migrate the system as the condition changes.
• Channel Richness — The cue-carrying capacity of a communication medium, determined by the varieties of cues, feedback, linguistic flexibility, and personalization it can support.
• Expressive Language — The clinical category for the output side of language — selecting, assembling, retrieving, and producing a decodable message — held apart from receptive comprehension because the two channels dissociate, and the discrepancy between them, not a composite score, drives intervention.
• McGurk effect — Show that speech perception is intrinsically multimodal: a face articulating /ga/ over an audio /ba/ is heard as /da/, because the auditory and visual streams are fused into a single percept — by reliability-weighted, coherence-gated combination — before the result reaches awareness.
• Media Richness Theory — Match a task's ambiguity to a medium whose cue capacity, feedback immediacy, language variety, and personal focus are sufficiently rich, diagnosing under- and over-richness as channel–task mismatch.
• Media Synchronicity — Match a communication medium to a task by decomposing the medium into five capabilities and reducing the task to one bit — convergence (build shared meaning fast and jointly) versus conveyance (transmit information the receiver processes at their own pace) — so higher synchronicity is not always better.
• Motion-Triggered Harm — The inclusive-design failure in which interface animation, autoplay, parallax, or screen flash exceeds a susceptible user's physiological tolerance — a presentation channel that doubles as a harm channel, delivering an involuntary stimulus the median-calibrated design never accounted for.
• Nonverbal Communication — Analyze face-to-face interaction as a finite set of meaning-bearing channels beyond words — kinesics, proxemics, haptics, chronemics, oculesics, vocalics, appearance — reading affect off the harder-to-fake channels when they diverge from speech.
• Perceivable Design — Require that every essential signal an interface conveys be decoupled from any single sensory channel and offered through an alternative at sufficient fidelity, so a user shut out of one channel — vision, hearing — is not excluded.
• Receptive Language — The comprehension arm of language capacity — receiving, parsing, and interpreting incoming linguistic input — defined in contrastive opposition to expressive (production) language, dissociable from it, and assessed on its own through an ordered processing stack with output held near zero.
• Social Presence — The felt sense of being together with another social actor through a medium — a variable distinct from transmission fidelity, jointly produced by cue inventory, self-disclosure, turn-taking synchrony, and individual recognition, and upstream of engagement, trust, learning, and retention.