Sue Ward's List: Speech/Language Diagnostics

• Trying to determine why professionals and parents are reluctant to introduce AAC to this population is of great interest to me.
• Both groups fear that if AAC is introduced into the intervention, then the child will not talk or stop talking. In addition, if AAC is introduced, there is the feeling that the professionals have given up on speech production. However, research has clearly not shown that. What it has consistently shown is that if AAC is introduced into the intervention plan of children with severe expressive communication disorders, there is often a marked increase in speech output.
• The lack of AAC knowledge can be another reason professionals and parents are reluctant in introducing AAC into a childs intervention plan.
• Children should always be provided with different multimodal communication options, such as speech, gestures, high and low tech AAC, and sign language as a means of communicating.

2 more annotations...