L&L Therapy Services, LLC

Spelling is a vital skill for people who rely on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). The ability to spell words provides an opportunity to create novel and spontaneous communication and increases educational, social, and employment opportunities for children and adults. However, many children and youth who rely on AAC struggle to gain functional spelling skills and written language. The purpose of this preliminary investigation was to develop a strategy to provide auditory letter-sounds using commercially available computer equipment and to evaluate how such a computerized "sounding out" strategy influences spelling accuracy for one child who required AAC support. The spelling accuracy of both consonants and vowels increased during intervention sessions when individual sounds associated with target words were provided compared to the baseline session when individual sounds were not provided. Future directions are discussed.

The evolution of online education has some parallels with the development of the field of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). It has taken some time for professionals in the broader fields of education, higher education, and speech-language pathology to seriously consider its potential contribution. Like AAC, online education was initially viewed with skepticism, but is now almost commonplace. In the face of data that affirm the effectiveness of online instruction, clinical educators are increasingly turning their attention to identifying and employing best practices to improve the learning outcomes of their students. The purpose of this article is to explore some of the common features of online education that hold promise for the AAC field. We also will discuss challenges faced by online instructors and strategies for addressing them.

The Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) is used to systematically teach functional communication through an evidence-based protocol. As a low-tech AAC system, PECS differs from many treatment protocols in that the learner must give a picture or a sequence of pictures to a communicative partner, thus ensuring social approach and interaction. Students who have mastered Phase IV of the PECS protocol and use a large, categorized vocabulary and sentence structure are candidates for transition to a speech generating devise (SGD). When choosing the SGD, the transition team has an ethical responsibility to ensure that the PECS user does not lose current communication abilities, such as independent access, initiation and efficiency of interactions, and sentence structure and length across environments. With careful assessment of SGD features, the clinician can select a device to replicate current PECS skills and allow for language growth. The use of relevant training strategies from the PECS protocol will help the clinician ensure a successful transition to and use of the SGD.

One of the instructional techniques reported in the literature to teach communication skills to persons with autism is video modeling (VM). VM is a form of observational learning that involves watching and imitating the desired target behavior(s) exhibited by the person on the videotape. VM has been used to teach a variety of social and communicative behaviors to persons with developmental disabilities such as autism. In this paper, we describe the VM technique and summarize the results of two single-subject experimental design studies that investigated the acquisition of spontaneous requesting skills using a speech generating device (SGD) by persons with autism following a VM intervention. The results of these two studies indicate that a VM treatment package that includes a SGD as one of its components can be effective in facilitating communication in individuals with autism who have little or no functional speech.

Recent research indicates that individuals who are nonverbal need to be presented a minimum of 200 opportunities a day to interact. In this project, we created 200 communication opportunities every day for students through training, modeling, and offering a data tracking system, resulting in more competent communicators. In this paper, we describe methods to offer students using augmentative communication more than 200 opportunities a day to express a wide range of communicative functions, such as answering, commenting, asking questions, stating opinions, and asserting independence.