AAC, Literacy Intervention & Children with Autism

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In these videos, you will see a 5-year-old boy who has autism and was referred to me by his parents at the age of 2 years 10 months. His natural speech consisted of five words at that time. His parents were told during a speech-language evaluation that their son could not benefit from an AAC system. They did further research and found that there were benefits to AAC treatment for children with autism, so they bought him an iPad and downloaded an AAC application (Proloquo2Go), called me and asked me if I could meet their son and possibly start working with him. After 12-18 months of weekly, 60-120 minutes AAC intervention sessions during naturalistic play activities and daily routines his vocabulary had expanded using his AAC system to include hundreds of words, including many core/high-frequency words. His AAC system was his primary mode of communication during that time. He also started to talk more (i.e., He used multiple modes of communication.). He was engaged in shared reading and alphabet awareness activities weekly to promote emergent literacy skills. Soon, he began navigating to the keyboard area on his AAC system to explore the alphabet and write. He also began to read high frequency words in books that were used for shared reading activities. After 2 1/2 years of consistent AAC and literacy intervention with the family implementing his AAC system at home, his natural speech production and written language have improved significantly.  He still benefits from an AAC system to support his natural speech, language comprehension and literacy skills. Before the videos were captured, he had been participating in a making words lesson to improve his phonemic awareness and spelling skills. He initiated a request to spell the word, airplane, which is a longer word than most words in the making words lesson, but I followed his lead to make the most of his initiation. I presented 12 letters to him, including the letters in the word airplane, in a random order, and used phonemic cues to help him determine what letter corresponded with each sound. The word, wings, was a target word in the making words lesson (Cunningham, P., 2017).  These videos show his enthusiasm and intrinsic motivation for communication and writing, and his progress in the last 2 1/2 years of therapy.  Sometimes AAC systems are permanent, long-term solutions and serve as a client's primary mode of communication. Other times, they may be more temporary as an individual starts using their natural speech to communicate. Again, this client still benefits from an AAC system and intervention to reduce frustration when natural speech does not meet his communication needs, and to strengthen his language comprehension and literacy skills.