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Intervention strategies are relatively limited for pre-intentional communicators that do not yet direct communication toward objects or toward others, particularly children who are early communicators with complex communication needs (CCN). Children who continue to rely on preintentional communication behaviors after infancy are at high risk for CCN regardless of their specific diagnosis. In particular, children with autism who do not develop effective and consistent intentional communication run a lifelong risk for situation-specific communication, including poor generalization of communication and prompt-dependency on partner cueing. The Tempt-Trigger intervention is a strategy that embeds partner assistance for children to produce communication skills into situations in which the child initiates individual signals of their intent. One of the benefits of the Tempt-Trigger intervention model is promoting child spontaneous initiation of meaningful communication behaviors, a skill particularly at risk for children with autism. Components of the strategy include: temptation (through situation and activity), trigger (the child's own natural behavior spontaneously produced at the temptation), transfer (helping the child produce a more effective communication behavior at the time they express the communicative intent), and touch (providing the child meaningful feedback of the means and results of this communication act). This poster demonstrates the effectiveness of the Tempt/Trigger intervention strategy at increasing object-directed and person-directed communication behaviors in three young children with autism spectrum disorders. At time of submission, two of the three children both developed and maintained person-directed communication due to the treatment, and complete results will be available on the third child by ISAAC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reports communication outcomes of infants given the Infant Social and Communication Behavior Scales (ISCBS) at 2-12 months, including both infants with presumed typical development and infants with known conditions at risk for complex communication needs (CCN). The ISCBS is a new dynamic play-based assessment being normed internationally that assesses preintentional communication skills in modality independent ways, suitable for children with any types of physical, sensory, cognitive, social, or other developmental impairments. The assessment incorporates both simple AAC and literacy activities, and scores infant behaviors in 12 modalities, including attention, reciprocity, engagement, speech, exploration, mastery, and affect. The assessment is intended both to predict communication risk factors from infancy to later childhood, and to assess and track progress of preintentional children of all ages who develop and express communication in atypical ways. Results indicate patterns of infant behaviors on the ISCBS that differed between infants who later (at 3 years) demonstrated language impairments, CCN, behavior or physical processing impairments, or autism at age three years from those who did not. No single pattern of impairment characterized all these disability risk groups in infancy. Instead, infants with different disability outcomes demonstrated significantly different risk characteristics from each other and from infants with typical development. Further research directions will be reported, including recruitment of international and multilingual sites for further norming of the ISCBS in other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the research-based strategies and augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) intervention for young nonspeaking children. AAC intervention for young children focuses on facilitating the transition from simpler to more complex strategies for communication. A key to intervention is making communicative behaviors outstanding for the child.

The article presents a case study on the role of teamwork in developing educational goals and augmentative and alternative communication intervention. Using a communicative "tools" model, concerns about enhancing behavioral communication to support more complex communication were addressed. Performance as well as symbol exposure and environmental response goals are included in all teams members agreed that legitimate education goals.

The article reports on the intentional communication of young children with physical impairments in the U.S. Physical impairments might interfere with the ability of the child to produce recognizable communicative behaviors. Systematic differences in early communication patters might have long-term implications for augmentative and alternative communication development. A study concerning the child's intentional communication is also emphasized in the article.

The article discusses the intervention strategies in the communication development of young nonspeaking children. A child who has not reached communication milestones minimal for successful augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) often delayed ACC intervention. ACC is not applicable for children with limited vocal and hand or arm behaviors, and functions are accomplished with other behavioral signals. Support for skill development can be done through a variety of augmented means.

The article presents a research on typical language development of children with communication disorders who rely on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) services. The research found that early communicative behaviors have increased the rate of later language development on children and provided the children the opportunity to have productive language expression. Furthermore, children who used AAC are assessed to demonstrate spontaneous imitation of parental behaviors.

The article focuses on the augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) skill development checklist for young children. The AAC assessment involve dynamic assessment of a child's improvement in communication skills that includes a trial of potential AAC strategies with modifications of increasing or decreasing a support and monitors a target skill of a child. This skill assessment strategy will be applied to case studies of young children that acquires AAC skills.

The article proposes some baseline procedures and measurements for documenting minimal functional skills by using the Augmentative & Alternative Communication (AAC) model to control basic communicative functions. These include spontaneous requesting with an AAC device, picture symbol identification, communicative choicemaking with an AAC device and new symbol learning.