by Julia Wynne, MA, CCC-SLP (Speech-Language Pathologist); NWACS Contributor

All too often, we see language learning expectations set far too low for complex communicators. These low expectations can limit a person’s ability to access to their daily lives as students, employees, and friends. As practitioners, parents, siblings, caretakers, and AAC users, we often settle for the ability to communicate basic needs and wants. Learning rule-based language increases access to literacy and language activities and results in better long-term academic and employment outcomes. This study by Kent-Walsh, Binger, and Buchanan looks at the effects of a direct intervention using AAC models and contrastive targets to target asking inverted yes/no questions.

I will start by explaining some key terms, and will then share the research question and why this information is essential to know. I will follow that with the authors’ conclusions and some critical takeaways so that we can apply this research to teaching our AAC learners. Away we go!  

Teaching Children Who Use Augmentative and Alternative Communication to Ask Inverted Yes/No Questions

Aided AAC Input (aka modeling) is a communication strategy, where a communication partner teaches symbol meaning and models language by combining his or her verbal input with a selection of vocabulary or symbols on the Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) system; this strategy is done by selecting vocabulary on the AAC system and speaking at the same time 

Aided Communication System: use of tools or equipment in addition to the user's body to communicate 

Contrastive Targets: modeling of a different structure to contrast with the targeted structure

Direct Intervention: services provided by a specialist that is in direct contact with the learner

Expressive Language: sharing thoughts, ideas, and feelings

Generalize: carrying skills over from a therapy setting to other settings or from a structure taught in therapy to other language structures

Speech-Generating Device: a communication aid with speech output

The goal of the research in this study was to evaluate the impact of an intervention program on using yes/no questions (e.g., “Is Jessie laughing?”) and the ability to generalize to other sentences using the copula “is” (e.g., “Jessie is happy.”), as well as longer sentences (e.g.,”Jessie is pushing button.”).

Children who use AAC tend to have limited expressive language, and few master grammar the same as their typically developing peers. AAC users tend to use single symbol messages when communicating. Mastering grammar can be a challenge for AAC learners, but research has shown that aided modeling can help improve expressive language. When grammatical structures are targeted, research has shown improvements in the production of those structures. However, very few studies have taught specific sentence types. Since AAC learners have limited opportunities to learn specific grammatical structures, they are not able to reach their full potential in expressive language.   

Constructing inverted yes/no questions (e.g., “Is Jesse laughing?”) has not been researched in the past. It is a valuable sentence structure for AAC users to learn. Asking questions is a powerful tool for AAC users to take a more active, rather than passive, role in communication. The approach that the researchers used also teaches individuals to build sentences. Also, teaching inverted yes/no questions is important for AAC learners because they are not able to use rising intonation to ask a question (e.g., Jessie is here?).

Three children who use natural speech, gestures, and the Proloquo2Go iPad app to communicate participated in the study. In each session, modeling and interactive play were used to teach inverted yes/no questions. In the first part of the session, parents and researchers provided 20 models of the targets, including a spoken model and a model using the child’s speech-generating device (SGD). The children were able to respond to the questions but did not produce the targets. During the second part of the therapy sessions, the children participated in a play activity and were given aided models, contrastive targets, and levels of prompting to produce the targeted structures. The children produced targeted sentence structures with high levels of accuracy, and all three children demonstrated generalization to sentences of similar structure and length. One of the participants demonstrated generalization to longer sentences. All participants in the study demonstrated the ability to ask new questions using simple inversion. This improvement shows that they learned the grammatical rule of the sentence, rather than memorizing a sequence of symbols on their SGD.

Results of the study show that teaching specific structures and word order can result in improvements in language expression. This study highlights the necessity of producing each word in a sentence and the importance of word order. Changing the order of the words in the sentence allowed the participants to ask a question using a communication device. AAC users need to learn to ask questions so that they can initiate interactions more often, rather than responding to questions from communication partners.

Please comment with any thoughts or questions!  

Full article link:  https://doi.org/10.1044/2015_AJSLP-14-0066

Images include Boardmaker PCS. The Picture Communication Symbols ©1981–2018 by Mayer-Johnson LLC. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Used with permission.

Reference

Kent-Walsh, J., Binger, C., & Buchanan, C. (2015). Teaching children who use augmentative and alternative communication to ask inverted yes/no questions using aided modeling. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 24, 222–236. https:// doi.org/10.1044/2015_AJSLP-14-0066

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