AAC and the Emergent Communicator: There Are No Shortcuts

I’ve experienced this many times. We place a high-tech, speech-generating device (SGD) in front of our nonverbal students who are also emergent communicators and… wham! Everyone expects them to start spontaneously producing sentences and participating in everything from social conversations with peers to answering questions related to rigorous academic content. If these things don’t happen as fast as everyone hoped they would, frustration occurs. Let’s backtrack for a moment. SGDs are wonderful, but devices make up only one piece of the augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) puzzle. They can’t replace the language intervention piece needed by an emergent communicator. Let’s consider typical language development. I’m a new mom. I know my baby will spend the majority of his first year of life listening to spoken language. He’s also going to start comprehending some of the vocabulary he’s exposed to in his linguistic environment. He’ll start vocalizing sounds. Those sounds will eventually become words. He’ll start to learn the meaning of individual words and how those words can be used in multiple ways. Research tells me his vocabulary growth will continue, but it’s going to be gradual. We typically start speaking in single words. As we acquire more words, we eventually put those words together to form simple phrases and sentences. We learn to use word endings and our sentences become more complex. In other words, it takes time to learn how to t...
Source: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Press Releases - Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Tags: Speech-Language Pathology Augmentative Alternative Communication Language Disorders Schools Speech Disorders Technology Source Type: blogs