4:39am July 20, 2014

➸ Uncommon Sense: AAC by 18 months

andreashettle:

Worth reading — a model of why the best advice on “when to start AAC” for a child for whom speech isn’t working well is “start VERY YOUNG” … don’t wait.

Yes, very important.

I wish that more had been available when I was a kid, and that more people would see how useful AAC can be now that more technology is readily available.

From one comment there: You have me convinced! My daughter just turned 3 and she is verbal but has very poor articulation, likely due to a combo of hearing loss, low tone, high palate etc. I understand 50% of what she says at best, and most people don’t understand much at all.

The details were a bit different, but that could have described me. And a lot of other people. I didn’t technically have a speech delay, but plenty of other problems with communication. A lot of what came out of my mouth was not that communicative when I was little, and what was a lot of people had trouble understanding to the point that I had meltdowns sometimes when it was important and couldn’t get the point across. Again, AFAICT not that unusual. And still not who is as often considered to maybe benefit from AAC. Communication problems are communication problems.

And I find it very frustrating that apparently a lot of the time adults will hold off on helping kids have some reliable method of communication, when what they’re doing obviously is not working that well for the kid. Everyone needs some reliable way of communicating so that others are likely to understand. :/ I still remember not really having that, and it’s a difficult way to live.

I would have needed AAC at a young age.

I also would’ve needed something that bypassed my receptive language difficulties. And especially that taught me the mechanics of communication and the meaning of communication, before teaching me what words were.

Because if I’d learned the structure of communication, and the fact that it was meant to take ideas from my head and put them into other people’s heads, and vice versa, then I would have maybe laid down my brain pathways in a way that allowed me to either speak or type without a lot of interference from a previously-learned but not-useful way to “communicate”.

It’s hard to communicate even now. Because before I learned to communicate properly in words, I learned to do something else that looked a lot like communication but wasn’t. And my brain defaults to that first way of doing things, especially under stress.

So learning the pathways of communication first, regardless of my receptive vocabulary, would’ve been crucial to making any communication system work.

Notes: