What does it mean to communicate (not) emotionally?

Communication is an essential part of our life. Though, not only communication is the key – it is all about emotional (prosodic) communication. Due to empirical research, people, who are augmentative communicators and speak with a voice output communication aid, want to express their emotions in the same way as everybody else – it is one of their deepest interests (Portnuff, 2006; Hoffmann and Wülfing, 2010). So far, current devices lack the opportunity of emotional utterances. This circumstance leads not only to a huge usability deficit, but furthermore, it is an obstacle to develop emotional competence and to behave as well as regulate one ́s emotion adequately (Blackstone and Wilkins, 2009). This article aims to increase the sensitivity for the importance of emotional communication. Furthermore, it tries to give first suggestions for implementing an usable device that supports users with a voice output communication aid to express emotional utterances. This could be done by using phrase-generation, as mentiond by Vanderheyden and Pennigton (1998).