Getting Started with AAC: What are the Prerequisites?

Communication is a human right. It is also how we connect with others, and how we express ourselves. Throughout the day we communicate in a range of ways – and we communicate a wide range of things. We protest, we request, we respond and we refuse – and more!

The history of AAC includes a period when we believed that there were prerequisites – that some individuals were candidates for AAC and others weren’t. Since the 1990s we have known that this is not the case – and that the “relationship between cognitive, communicative, and linguistic skills is not as predictable as it might have been viewed initially by child language investigators.” Romski and Sevcik (1988)

Unfortunately, however, the concept of prerequisites still dominates some of the conversations around AAC implementation. This presentation will give you information and resources to counter these assumptions and will also discuss the best practice framework of the Participation Model (Beukelman and Mirenda 1998) as a systematic process for making decisions about AAC assessment and intervention.

“It’s fine to ‘party like it’s 1999’ but let’s not practice [AAC] that way.” (Zangari, 2013.)

This presentation is 45 minutes.