People with disabilities are more likely to be hospitalized and use health care services than people without disabilities. They also report negative experiences interacting with health care providers during these encounters, placing them at risk for preventable adverse medical events, poor quality of life, and dependence on others. Fortunately,…

Written expression is critical to the full participation of individuals with autism spectrum disorder and complex communication needs in a wide range of educational and community contexts. Unfortunately, the extant research on teaching writing to this unique population is limited and, thus, provides little guidance to practitioners in the design…

When people with aphasia have difculty communicating, there is a risk for miscommunication and negative outcomes related to medical care and safety (Blacksone, Beukelman, & Yorkson, 2015). This risk can be reduced by ensuring that each person with aphasia can communicate efectively when using diferent types of discourse and at diferent points…

People with aphasia can be marginalized by a communicatively inaccessible society. Compounding this problem, routinized exclusion from stroke research leads to bias in the evidence base and subsequent inequalities in service provision. Within the United Kingdom, the Clinical Research Network of the National Institute of Health identified this…

The increasing incidence of aging adults with cognitive-communication impairments and demand for services that enhance the quality of life of this population necessitates examination of the evidence-based srategies that hold the mos promise in producing desired quality-of-life outcomes. The adoption of person-centered care approaches in health…

Communication supports for people with motor speech disorders can include strategies and technologies to supplement natural speech efforts, resolve communication breakdowns, and replace natural speech when necessary to enhance participation in all communicative contexts. This article emphasizes communication supports that can enhance…

Today, children with hearing loss are often identified at birth, fitted with advanced hearing technology, and enrolled in family-centered early intervention. Most of these children have the opportunity to enter kindergarten or first grade with language competencies that rival their hearing peers. For these children to be successful communicators…

People with communication support needs experience barriers that limit their social inclusion in society. A community approach such as "communication access" that targets changing attitudes, skills, and resources may assist in facilitating community participation. The authors describe the development of communication access from 2008 in…

This article focuses on a narrative account of a therapeutic journey experienced by 2 of the authors: an individual (P.D.) with a diagnosis in adulthood of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and a speech-language pathologist/researcher (I.W.). Instead of adopting a traditional expert clinician treating an impaired patient stance in a highly formalized…

Discourse is a commonly occurring and cognitively demanding form of naturalistic communication (e.g., conversation, event narration, personal and fictional narratives, text reading/generation). Because of the prevalence of these communication acts in daily routines (e.g., educational, vocational, and social), disrupted discourse is an important…

Purpose: A primary goal of aphasia intervention is to improve everyday communication. Although a large body of research focuses on treatment generalization, transfer of learning to real-world interactions involving discourse does not always occur. The goal of an integrated discourse treatment for aphasia (IDTA) approach is to facilitate such…

This exploratory qualitative study investigated the use of therapeutic writing for counseling long-term caregivers of spouses with brain injury and neurogenic communication disorders. Three participants wrote an average of six single-spaced pages of text. After analysis of the written text, the common themes of onset of diagnosis, anger, grief,…

The goal of this exploratory study was to investigate electronic communication as a potential method to enhance social communication in a range of students with disabilities. This study investigated the usability of an adapted e-mail interface, TeenMail, for 11 middle school students with significant learning and communication impairments who…

During clinical interactions between speech-language pathologists and adults with aphasia, a variety of emotional issues arise. The literature suggests that while counseling is within the scope of practice, SLPs tend to avoid emotional issues in therapy (A. Holland, 2007a). The precise mechanisms employed for circumventing emotional issues in…