Seeing Into the Future: Adults' Accuracy Predicting the Vocabulary of Early Symbolic Communicators Who Use Augmentative and Alternative Communication.

Purpose: Vocabulary access is important for individuals who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), especially for children in the early stages of language learning. This study sought to understand how accurate speech-language pathologists (SLPs), teachers, and parents are in predicting the vocabulary needed by early symbolic communicators who use AAC in three contexts.

Method: Ten groups, each with a child who used AAC as their primary mode of communication and who was classified as an early symbolic communicator and their parent, teacher, and SLP, participated. The parents, teachers, and SLPs predicted a vocabulary list of words children who use AAC needed to participate in a dinner, a math lesson, and a speech session using the blank page method and categorical inventories technique. Children were then recorded in 15-min videos participating in the three contexts. Words were recorded and compared to the words predicted.

Results: There was large variability in the accuracy of percentage of words the children used that were predicted by the adults out of all the words the children used. The adults were significantly more accurate predicting the vocabulary for the math lesson than the dinner.

Conclusions: Parents, teachers, and SLPs predicted much of the vocabulary of early symbolic communicators who use AAC. Implications for early vocabulary selection and alternatives to predicting vocabulary are discussed.