Despite enormous improvements in AT devices and services in American classrooms, the number of students with special needs, and the complexity of needs that they and their families experience continues to be sky rocketed nationwide. In response to these urgent needs, more advanced and specialized assistive technologies have been developed that…

We evaluated a program for teaching two adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to perform more advanced operations on an iPod-based speech-generating device (SGD). The effects of the teaching program were evaluated in a multiprobe multiple baseline across participants design that included two intervention phases. The first intervention…

The Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) is a communication program that has become widely used, especially with children with autism. This paper reports the results of a review of the empirical literature on PECS. A descriptive review is provided of the 27 studies identified, which included randomized controlled trials (RCTs), other group…

Purpose: This systematic review aimed to determine the effects of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) intervention on speech production in children with autism or pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified. Method: A systematic review methodology was utilized to limit bias in searching, selecting, coding, and…

Requesting is often taught as an initial target during augmentative and alternative communication intervention in children with autism. Speech-generating devices are purported to have advantages over non-electronic systems due to their synthetic speech output. On the other hand, it has been argued that speech output, being in the auditory…

Purpose: Research comparing the intelligibility of human and synthesized speech among both young children and adults has indicated that synthesized speech results in a degrading of intelligibility. The purpose of this study was to compare speech intelligibility of high-probability sentences produced using DECtalk[R] "Perfect Paul" and live speech…