Enhancing Augmentative and Alternative Communication Speed and Accuracy

During Phase I (completed in 2014), the team developed a prototype app for students who require assistive technology to communicate. Components of the prototype included pictures of over 650 symbols that represent words, an assembly bar with words and phrases that students use to construct sentences, a text-to-speech engine, and a relational database used to convert the symbols to words. At the end of Phase I, pilot research with eight grade school students with speech disabilities showed that the prototype functioned as intended and that students were able to successfully generate sentences that were read aloud by the app. In Phase II, the team will add components to the prototype and build out the functionality of the predictive algorithm to customize the support the app can provide. After the development is complete, researchers will use a quasi-experimental research design (specifically, an ABAB reversal design) with approximately 16 kindergarten through grade 8 students diagnosed with Autism to test the effects of the app. In the study, groups of students will alternate using and not using the app over a series of weeks. Analyses will compare student communication rates and accuracy with and without the app during this period.