Teaching VOCA use as a communicative repair strategy.

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 disabilities to repair communicative breakdowns by using a voice-output communication aid (VOCA). Intervention occurred at morning snack time when the students had the opportunity to access preferred items through prelinguistic behavior (e.g., reaching, guiding). Breakdowns occurred when the listener failed to attend to the student's initial request. Effects of the intervention were evaluated in a multiple-baseline design across subjects. Both students learned to use the VOCA to repair communicative breakdowns. As VOCA use was acquired as a repair strategy, the students also began to use the device to initiate requests when there had been no breakdown in communication. The intervention appeared to be an effective approach for supplementing prelinguistic behaviors with an additional option for communicating a request.

Teaching students with developmental disabilities to locate their AAC device.

Students with autism and related developmental disabilities who do not speak are often taught to use some type of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) system, such as a voice output communication aid (VOCA). One problem with such devices is that the person may be unable to communicate when the device is not readily accessible. We first taught three nonverbal students with autism to use a VOCA to request access to preferred items. Following this initial acquisition phase, however, none of the students would locate their VOCA when it was not within reach. A least-to-most prompting procedure was implemented to teach the students to locate their AAC device. The effectiveness of this procedure for teaching VOCA location skills was evaluated in a delayed multiple-baseline across subjects design. The results showed that the intervention was effective in teaching the students to locate their AAC device when they needed it to request access to preferred objects. Teaching VOCA location skills may be a useful and necessary component in AAC interventions for some people with developmental disabilities.