This article presents a review of the research on the use of mobile touch-screen devices such as PDAs, iPod Touches, iPads and smart phones by people with developmental disabilities. Most of the research has been on very basic use of the devices as speech generating devices, as a means of providing video, pictorial and/or audio self-prompting and…

Powerful, portable, off-the-shelf handheld devices, such as tablet based computers (i.e., iPad®; Galaxy®) or portable multimedia players (i.e., iPod®), can be adapted to function as speech generating devices for individuals with autism spectrum disorders or related developmental disabilities. This paper reviews the research in this new and rapidly…

Many individuals with autism cannot speak or cannot speak intelligibly. A variety of aided augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) approaches have been investigated. Most of the research on these approaches has been single-case research, with small numbers of participants. The purpose of this investigation was to meta-analyze the single…

Students with developmental disabilities often rely on prelinguistic behavior (e.g., reaching, leading) to communicate. When listeners fail to attend to prelinguistic behaviors, students may benefit from responding with an alternative form of communication to repair the breakdown. In the present study, we taught two students with developmental…