AAC intervention research and practice mostly focus on teaching individuals to use their device to make requests, but there’s more to communicating than just expressing immediate wants and needs. This presentation will use a storytelling format to share the results of a study where researchers set out to develop an AAC narrative intervention (Story Champs AAC Expansion Pack) to help three students with autism improve other communicative functions.
The AAC narrative intervention involved an SLP delivering 9-12 sessions (30 minutes each) in the homes of the participants in English across 4-5 weeks. Each session involved a lesson plan with explicit steps for: modeling a regular story, pointing to and naming icons, reading a simplified story and modeling the language targets in the story (1 noun, 1 adjective, 1 verb) using the child's speech generating device (SGD), using least-to-most prompting to support the student’s retell with fading illustrations. The researchers then examined several outcomes: (1) does the AAC narrative intervention improve students’ ability to retell the key parts of a story?, (2) do students improve multi-symbol use during intervention lessons?, and (3) do parents think the intervention was feasible and acceptable so its use could extend beyond sessions with a speech-language pathologist or school special education teacher?
Data was collected using total story grammar use in retelling modified PreK CUBED-3 Narrative Language Measures: Listening forms at the end of every session, the start of the next session, and at follow-up. Parents recorded children’s spontaneous use of SGD outside of intervention sessions. Results found that in as few as 9-10 sessions, students made large and significant gains in story retell and multi-symbol use-- key prerequisites for other communicative functions like personal storytelling. Parents loved the program and planned to embed the activity into their child’s home routine! Examples of the intervention's components will be shared in the presentation.
