Communication Strategies for People with Severe Disabilities

This book describes communication strategies for people with severe disabilities who are nonverbal or minimally verbal. It examines the major assessment and intervention strategies that have been developed to enable expressive and receptive communication. In addition, the book explores contemporary research focused on teaching nonverbal and minimally verbal persons to use a range of communication strategies for expressive and receptive communication. It addresses the advantages and disadvantages of each communication strategy, selecting curriculum for communication intervention programs, and assessing the communication needs of individuals with severe disabilities who are nonverbal or minimally verbal.

Key areas of coverage include:

• Assessing communication strengths and areas of intervention need.
• Developing communication intervention curricula.
• Prelinguistic intervention.
• Natural gestures and manual signing strategies.
• Aided augmentative and alternative communication strategies, including tangible symbols, picture-based systems, speech-generating devices, and assistive technology solutions for individuals with sensory-motor impairment.
• Visual strategies to enhance receptive communication.

Communication Strategies for People with Severe Disabilities is an invaluable resource for clinicians, therapists, and other professionals as well as researchers, professors, and graduate students in the interrelated fields of clinical child and school psychology, developmental psychology, child and adolescent psychiatry, clinical social work, applied behavior analysis, augmentative and alternative communication, special education, and speech-language pathology.

Chapter 1 Describing Severe Disability. - Chapter 2 Communication Impairment and Assessment. - Chapter 3 Prelinguistic Communication. - Chapter 4 Enhancing Natural Gestures. - Chapter 5 Teaching Manual Signs. - Chapter 6 Use of Tangible Symbols. - Chapter 7 Effective Communication Using Picture Exchange. - Chapter 8 Communicating with Speech-Generating Devices. - Chapter 9 Assistive Technology Solutions for Enabling People with Intellectual and Motor or Sensory-Motor Disabilities to Access Communication Events. - Chapter 10 Visual Strategies for Receptive Communication.