Still having his say: David Yoder's legacy in AAC.

On February 2 2023, one of the guiding lights in the field of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for more than four decades, David E. Yoder, passed away at the age of 90. A voracious reader and gifted storyteller, David was particularly fond of a quote from George Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah, "You see things; and you say 'Why?' but I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?'" That vision led him to take on multiple leadership roles and influence the field of AAC in multiple ways. He played a pivotal role in establishing both the International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ISAAC) and the United States Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (USSAAC). Additionally, he chaired the panel for the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR)'s inaugural Consensus Validation Conference on AAC, advocated for the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association to recognize AAC within the profession's scope of practice, and served as the first editor for the Augmentative and Alternative Communication journal. In this tribute, we describe David's diverse and unique contributions to improving the lives of people with communication challenges with a focus on some of his central insights and actions.

Early Intervention and AAC: What a Difference 30 Years Makes.

This article provides an overview of early intervention and AAC over the 30-year period since the founding of the journal Augmentative and Alternative Communication in 1985. It discusses the global context for early intervention and addresses issues pertaining to young children from birth to 6 years of age. It provides a narrative review and synthesis of the evidence base in AAC and early intervention. Finally, it provides implications for practice and future research directions.

Voices from the past: comparing the rapid prompting method and facilitated communication.

OBJECTIVE: This article briefly reviews the history and damage caused by facilitated communication (FC) and highlights the parallels between FC and the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM). BACKGROUND: FC involves a therapist (or facilitator) supporting the hand of a person with autism while a message is typed on a letter board. FC is widely acknowledged to be a pseudoscientific, unsafe, and unethical treatment for people with autism. RPM is a more recent intervention for people with autism that involves the facilitator holding and moving the letter board while the individual with autism moves their own hand. Those who espouse the perceived benefits of FC and RPM make strikingly similar claims of hidden intelligence and extraordinary communication abilities in people with autism following treatment. CONCLUSION: Clients, proponents, and practitioners of RPM should demand scientific validation of RPM in order to ensure the safety of people with disabilities that are involved with RPM.

A primer for doing talk-in-interaction research in Augmentative and Alternative Communication.

The study of talk-in-interaction is focused on how people conduct social interactions in real world situations, in real-time. The purpose of this article is to provide a primer for understanding talk-in-interaction research, conversation analysis and microanalysis in the AAC field. An overview of talk-in-interaction research and a discussion of important issues in the field will be presented, followed by a tutorial on conducting microanalytic investigations in AAC.

Early evidence of low-tech communication in an Otto Dix painting of 1920.

This paper presents and analyzes a finding that gives evidence of the use of a low-tech communication device long before the formal establishment of the field of augmentative and alternative communication. The device, a simple low-tech alphabet board, is portrayed in a 1920 painting of World War I veterans by German Expressionist Otto Dix. Entitled "War Cripples," the painting shows one of the veterans, who sustained severe disfigurement and jaw mutilation resulting in speech loss, pointing to a letter on a chart pinned to his uniform. The analysis of the painting utilized Aby Warburg's methodology for researching the significance of images within the cultural context in which they are produced.

When mobile communication technologies were new.

In the 19th century, mechanical hearing aids opened up new possibilities for controlling sound waves and managing conversations. Components and ideals from these acoustical instruments became part of the foundation for electroacoustics, the conversion of sounds into "signals". Mechanical hearing aids also set lasting standards for portability and unobtrusiveness in the design of personal communication technology.

Speech processing in vocoder-centric cochlear implants.

The principles of the most recent cochlear implant processors are similar to that of the channel vocoder, originally used for transmitting speech over telephone lines with much less bandwidth than that required for transmitting the unprocessed speech signal. An overview of the various vocoder-centric processing strategies proposed for cochlear implants since the late 1990s is provided including the strategies used in different commercially available implant processors. Special emphasis is placed on reviewing the strategies designed to enhance pitch information for potentially better music perception. The various noise suppression strategies proposed over the years based on multi-microphone and single-microphone inputs are also described.

Historical issues in intervention research: hidden knowledge and facilitating techniques in Denmark.

Facilitating techniques have recently both gained wider popularity and stirred considerable controversy. They are usually assumed to originate in Australia but the present paper documents that similar techniques created a major public event in Denmark and appeared occasionally in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s. However, in spite of the dramatic claims made by proponents of the techniques, their use did not spread widely and the international network has remained tenuous. It is argued that the "discovery' of facilitating techniques as a means to disclose unexpected literacy depends on the use of hand guidance and a context of professional beliefs where responses of unclear origin may be attributed to the person whose hand is being guided.