Part One: Assessment
I gave a presentation about AAC in a Speech/Hearing Sciences class on autism last week, and I want to share the text with you as a sort of “Intro to AAC” geared mostly towards students and professionals relatively new to the subject. That said, there’s probably going to be good info in here for families too as well as some core advocacy concepts AAC users might be interested in. (Warning, if you’ve read my blog before you may see some duplication of ideas, the goal with this two-part post is just to get all the sort of 101 info from my presentation into a consolidated online resource.) This week I’ll post the portion about assessing autistic people for AAC supports, and then next week will be tips on working with AAC users and helping advocate with us for communication rights.
As for assessment, hopefully you have already heard the phrase “presume competence”. This is a key principle in the AAC field. Another phrase I like that gets at the same thing is, “an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. So just because you have a child or adult in front of you who hasn’t yet demonstrated an ability to communicate, that doesn’t mean the ability is not there – it might just mean that they haven’t been offered the right supports yet. Think back to the social model of disability, and until proven otherwise assume that an autistic person’s lack of communication is a fault in the environment rather than a fault in their brain. There is nothing inherently superior about speech compared to other communication methods, so there’s no reason you should hold out for someone to develop speech – just provide AAC modeling early and constantly and see what happens. (Modeling means using the chosen AAC method for your part of the conversation so that we have an example of how to use it, the way speaking children hear speech around them all day to learn from.) The autistic person you’re working with may eventually develop speech or they may not, but with AAC at least they have a chance of communicating in the meantime. That’s a human right for people of every age and every neurotype.
There is a flip side to this, and it’s when you’re assessing an autistic person who does use speech, but perhaps has articulation or pragmatic impairments. Or maybe their speech even seems completely adequate to you – but please don’t assume that it is adequate to them internally! Verbal and semiverbal autistic people might very much benefit from AAC. An autistic friend who studies neuroscience, Alyssa Hillary Zisk, recently published an article on this. For many of us AAC is easier on our overall motor planning demands, or we have better fine motor control than oral motor control, or it is easier to work with visuals than auditory words, or it just saves us energy that would better be directed towards other areas like executive function skills or sensory modulation. We may not be expressing quite what we’re really trying to say when we have to use speech, or we may be unnecessarily exhausted by it. So I would recommend that any autistic person you encounter in your work should be considered for AAC supports. And actually, I’ll extend that to anyone presenting to a speech therapist in general, because someone who struggles with communication might not have an accurate diagnosis yet.
How do you decide on an AAC method? Well, do all the formal assessments and checklists you want, but if the person has already demonstrated any ability to understand choices and make decisions, I’d suggest also just showing them the various options and directly asking what they want to try! For people who haven’t yet had the opportunity to demonstrate an ability to understand choices and make decisions, start modeling at least one AAC method, while pairing with speech, and see what the person shows an interest in. If people around them don’t display a bias towards a specific communication method, then the autistic person will show you their preference by trying out the one that works best for them.
In choosing an AAC method to trial it’s important to consider communicators’ strengths versus impairments in motor skills as well as sensory modalities – alongside what is going to be most effective for their environment. For example, if someone’s family refuses to learn sign language, it might not be a good option. Of course, if it’s what the communicator prefers, you should be pressing their caregivers to support that. Considering cultural competence is also important – for example, a child from an immigrant family might prefer a text to speech device that offers an accent that fits their heritage rather than a device that only has white American voices. And gender variance is more common in autistic people than the general public, so never make an assumption about which gender coded voice a communicator will prefer.
Okay, there’s my thoughts on assessment, stay tuned for next week’s post on working with AAC users!
homo qui vixit 