PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
People tend to falsely assume that the more unintelligible a child’s speech is, the more cognitively impaired
that child is. However, intelligibility is not strongly correlated with intellect. In fact, many children with profound
speech impairments have cognitive abilities that far exceed their speech abilities. Unfortunately, this false
assumption leads to a series of negative social, educational, health, quality of life, and eventual employment
outcomes – outcomes that are all too common for the 1 in 100-125 people in the U.S. with such severe speech
disabilities that they require augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). If children could use AAC to
‘speak’ in sentences, this would transform expectations and outcomes. Two gaps in knowledge prevent
preliterate children from producing sentences via AAC: (1) data-based interventions have focused almost
exclusively on basic social and vocabulary skills - not sentence-building skills; and (2) the AAC apps on iPads
and other mobile technologies are too complex. Preliterate children spend precious cognitive resources
searching for picture symbols instead of building sentences. The result is that they ‘speak’ using single words
in most cases, despite an underlying ability to produce full sentences. Therefore, a critical need exists to
develop data-driven interventions that support AAC sentence-building while minimizing the learning demands
of current technologies. Failure to conduct this research will result in preschoolers with severe speech
impairments continuing to experience a lifetime of underachievement and poor quality of life. The long-term
goal for this line of research is to identify AAC interventions that enable children to become fully competent
communicators as early in life as possible, thereby gaining access to a wealth of opportunities. The focus of
the current proposal is to compare the effectiveness of the AAC Generative Language Intervention approach to
an AAC Standard of Care condition on preschool sentence productions. All children will use existing AAC iPad
applications. The central hypothesis is that preschoolers receiving AAC Generative Language Intervention will
create longer, more grammatically complete sentences compared with the Standard of Care condition. Specific
Aim 1 compares these interventions for preschoolers with severe speech impairments and typical receptive
language, and Specific Aim 2 does the same for children with Down syndrome. Specific Aim 3 tests for
possible moderation of the intervention effect by age, dynamic assessment scores, sentence type, receptive
language abilities, prior AAC use, sex, mental age, and disability. Aims 1 and 2 will be accomplished using
randomized controlled trials. Hierarchical linear modeling will be used to examine interactions for Aim 3. The
achievement of the aims will have a broad impact on early sentence development and long-term quality of life
for children who use AAC. This work will chart a new horizon of AAC research to create data-based
interventions that capitalize on the availability of current technologies, simplify existing AAC apps, and promote
early sentence productions, with the goal of mirroring the language skills and quality of life outcomes of peers.