Noun

pioneer (pluralpioneers)

1. One who goes before, as into the wilderness, preparing the way for others to follow

Verb

to pioneer (third-person singular simple presentpioneers, present participlepioneering, simple pastpioneered, past participlepioneered)

1. To go before and prepare or open a way for; to act as pioneer.

Retrieved from "http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pioneer" (July 15, 2007)

It is fitting to open this issue of Topics in Language Disorders (TLD) with a quotation from an online dictionary from cyberspace, the Wiktionary. In fact, as expressed in another online dictionary, Encarta, the second meaning for the word cyberspace (after "1. imagined place where electronic data goes")is "virtual reality" (retrieved July 15, 2007, through

Microsoft(R) Office Online).

One of the main points that issue editors Trisha Self and Rosalind Scudder make in their Foreword to this issue of TLD is that the future is now. They and their invited authors have shown that the way is open and reasonable for clinicians to begin to apply virtual reality (VR) technologies to the challenges faced by people with language disorders and other cognitive and communication needs.

Imagination is the sister of meaningful question formulation in moving science and clinical practice forward. Solid research methodology is a necessary tool for preparing the way to evidence-based practice (EPB), and randomized control trial research is its gold standard. Research methodology is not the only tool of EBP, however; nor is it the first tool required when pioneering new realms of clinical practice. Prior to large-scale research studies, innovative questions and client-informed purposes must drive the development of prototypes that then are evaluated, refined, and retooled by clinical scientists and their interdisciplinary partners. Without the imagination and risk-taking of pioneers who are engaged in moving clinical practice forward, practice would stagnate.

This issue of TLD is exciting not only for the innovative applications of VR technologies to pressing clinical questions, but also for the insider look it offers readers into the process of innovation itself. First, consider the clinical questions addressed in this issue. It is the responsibility and special contribution of clinical researchers to generate research questions that are relevant to concerns of functional significance. Relevant practices are those that are designed to help clients participate more effectively in everyday contexts. Significance is determined by asking clients and their family members which contexts and communicative or related functions they view as important (hence, relevant).

As Self and Scudder showed in their article, asking parents of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) about their highest priorities for intervention revealed that teaching children with ASD to be more safety conscious in dangerous contexts is high on parental lists. Strickland and her coauthors addressed similar questions about learning to function safely in dangerous contexts when children have cognitive-communicative disorders that affect their abilities to judge risks and respond appropriately. Conducting clinical interventions in actual dangerous contexts is not appropriate, of course, but children with ASD or with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD; as studied by Strickland and her coauthors) are especially likely to need repeated practice and concrete examples. VR is ideal for these purposes because it can provide opportunities for controlled practice in situations that evoke the sense of actual presence in dangerous situations without the child actually being in danger.

Authors in this issue whet readers' imagination to consider other categories of questions beyond those dealing with safety issues. For example, VR applications could be used to set up conditions for acquiring and stabilizing cognitive-communication abilities efficiently and effectively when a range of communicative settings and partners should be involved in therapy. Cobb and her colleagues addressed such clinical questions when they studied VR applications to teach community- based skills associated with travel independence and social judgment for people with developmental cognitive-communication disorders. Brundage and her colleagues described their pursuit of clinical questions for adults who stutter, with an aim of helping them speak more fluently when facing a hierarchy of audience challenges that could be controlled with VR. This pioneering research was aimed at understanding how job interviewers or virtual audiences in public speaking events were experienced as increasingly challenging by the participants. The researchers asked participants directly and considered other objective evidence that they were perceiving the virtual experiences as "real."

Another particular strength of this issue, on top of the fascinating topic itself and the clinical questions addressed, is the insider look it offers readers into the processes of innovation. Often, journal articles present only endpoint research, giving the impression that good clinical and research questions are easy to generate and that the process of developing new clinical tools is smooth and painless. Any research team knows that this is almost never the case. Pioneer researchers go into topical areas where few other researchers have gone before (who could resist a Star Trek influence with this futuristic theme?), and they modify their approaches based on formative evaluation processes.

Providing a glimpse into early-stage processes of question exploration and focusing, Garcia and her coauthors showed how they engaged clinical consultants in generating relevant clinical questions in the domain of functional communication for people with aphasia. Other authors shared information that revealed multiple aspects of the recursive processes of pioneering research. They also modeled persistence and willingness to modify designs during development. In many cases, teams tried out iterative generations of hardware and software in pursuit of their goals to create VR therapeutic experiences that were both effective and efficient. We think that this makes the issue of particular interest to our dual audiences of researchers and practitioners.

As issue editors Self and Scudder recommend in their Foreword, readers can take a virtual journey through this issue of TLD. Although the topic is futuristic, we believe that the issue editors were successful in their stated goal to convince readers that the future is now.

Nickola Wolf Nelson, PhD, Editor

Katharine G. Butler, PhD, Editor Emerita