This literature review examines the present level of evidence in support of communication-based treatments for children with autism spectrum disorders. Reviews to date have reported on research published through 2002. The current article included 36 studies published between 2002 and 2007. Best available evidence is presented for seven treatment categories: applied behavior analysis, naturalist...

This review sought to determine the evidence base of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) use with infants and toddlers with disabilities. The review identified 12 studies, involving 190 participants aged 36 months or younger. The majority of the studies investigated unaided AAC methods (e.g., gestures or sign language), with 42% of the studies also including aided AAC methods. Alth...

Individuals share experiences and build relationships through the medium of narrative. Lifelong personal narratives play a key role in developing social identity. Individuals with little or no functional speech due to severe speech and physical impairments (SSPI) find it difficult to share personal narrative as augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems do not support interactive ...

The number of technical aids now available has allowed severely multiply-handicapped children to better participate in their education. Project TEACH (Technical-Educational Aids for Children with Handicaps), a 3-year early childhood demonstration project of the Federal Office of Education, provided ten children with seating systems, mobility aids, feeding devices, and augmentative communication...

An adaptive noncontact gesture-based system for augmentative communication is described. The system detects movement of any anatomical site through the analysis of reflected speckle. This movement is converted into two-dimensional (2-D) cursor coordinates and an adaptive software interface provides click actions and decision strategies. The system requires no accessory to be placed on the user....

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) promise to provide a novel access channel for assistive technologies, including augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems, to people with severe speech and physical impairments (SSPI). Research on the subject has been accelerating significantly in the last decade and the research community took great strides toward making BCI-AAC a practical reali...

Alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) systems used by people with speech disabilities rely on textto-speech (TTS) engines for synthesizing speech. Advances in TTS systems allowing for the rendering of speech with a range of emotions have yet to be incorporated into AAC systems, leaving AAC users with speech that is mostly devoid of emotion and expressivity. In this work, we describe ...

We describe a novel approach and practical solution to an interactive sign language machine translation system from English to South African Sign Language. We interface the system with the GNApp application, which is an augmentative and alternative communication front-end, in order to resolve word sense ambiguities. This enhances the correctness of the rule-based translation system. We also arg...