Children with developmental language or speech disorders frequently benefit from augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) strategies. These children have severe expressive or receptive communication disorders or both which sometimes occur in isolation, or as part of a global developmental disability. Children with specific language impairment, pervasive developmental disorder, developme...

Autism spectrum disorders are developmental disorders characterised as deficits in social and communication skills, and they affect both verbal and non-verbal communication. Previous works measured differences in children with and without autism spectrum disorders in terms of linguistic and acoustic features, although they do not mention automatic identification using integration of these featu...

Communication skills are important to overall wellbeing, for creating positive interpersonal atmosphere and for solving interpersonal problems. Many patients suffering with various psychiatric disorders suffer from either a state-dependent decrease of social skills or lifelong deficits of such skills. Patients with social skills deficits such as problems with communication with others people, s...

Case studies of children with autism indicate that there are still many patterns in therapy and assessing the abilities non-speaking is a huge problem. The search for individually-adapted communication strategies should be emphasised. Writing offers great opportunities communication, however, it often not offered to nonspeaking children, especially those profound perceptual disorders.

It is not surprising to find microbiome abnormalities present in psychiatric disorders such as depressive disorders, bipolar disorders, etc. Evolutionary pressure may provide an existential advantage to the host eukaryotic cells in that it survives in an extracellular environment containing non-self cells (e.g., bacteria). This phenomenon is both positive and negative, as with other intercellul...

Pervasive developmental disorders are severe childhood psychiatric disorders that afflict millions of children worldwide. Despite availability of tremendous data on these disorders, there is a paucity of information among clinicians including mental health professionals. Pervasive developmental disorders, caused by multiple neurobiological and environmental etiologies, are characterized mainly ...

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and complex communication needs often rely on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) as a means of functional communication. This meta-analysis investigated how individual characteristics moderate effectiveness of three types of aided AAC: the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS), speech-generating devices (SGDs), and other pict...