And more
/Boyce et al. found that school-aged children with cleft lip and/or palate had receptive and expressive language skills within the normal range, similar to their typically developing peers. Note that children with clefts in this study did not have a co-occurring syndromic diagnosis or other major medical condition. The findings remind us to evaluate all students individually, and without making assumptions based on diagnoses.
Caron et al. found interventions using AAC software with Transition to Literacy (T2L) features increased sight word recognition accuracy for kids with autism. T2L, currently available on a few speech generating devices/apps, is designed to make orthographic and phonological cues more salient for people who use AAC. Check out the full article for pictures that show how the app draws attention to the words—and be on the lookout for these features to make their way into more dynamic AAC systems.
Guiberson & Crowe, recognizing that we have a limited evidence base for intervention with multilingual children with hearing loss, reviewed interventions designed for multilingual children only, children with hearing loss only, and multilingual children with hearing loss— specifically audition, speech, language, and literacy interventions. You’ll need to use your clinical judgment to apply the findings, but it’s a starting point if you find yourself supporting students with similar needs.
Morin et al. evaluated the quality of research on the use of high-tech AAC to teach social-communication skills. They found that using high-tech AAC to teach social-communication skills to individuals with ASD or ID can be considered an evidence-based practice. Their review also indicated that high-tech AAC was not significantly better than low-tech AAC when teaching social-communication skills to this population.a
Ring et al. studied the efficacy of the Take Flight reading intervention, an Orton-Gillingham based approach with and added focus on phonological awareness, reading rate, and comprehension. Their results support previous findings on the effectiveness of the individual treatment components (synthetic phonics, etc.), including the benefit of adding comprehension work.
Sutherland et al. completed a systematic review of telehealth assessment and intervention for children and adults with ASD. They found that services delivered via telehealth were equivalent to those delivered face-to-face, however, the recipients of the majority of the interventions were parents, carers, and/or teachers. Those that did include individuals with ASD interacting with the interventionist were predominantly adults and older children with ASD. The authors emphasized that future research must look at telehealth services when providing direct services to people with ASD, especially young children.
We know it helps to leverage L1 when we teach English vocab (see our review of Méndez et al.), but how do you actually DO that if you're not bilingual yourself? One possible avenue might be computer-based bilingual vocabulary lessons tied to e-books. Wood et al. found that Kindergarten–1st grade English Learners who read e-books with embedded vocab instruction in Spanish and English made greater gains in vocabulary than those who only read the books.
Wood et al. found that electropalatography (EPG) could be an effective way to help people with Down Syndrome (DS) improve their articulation, and that the visual feedback EPG provides capitalizes on a strength of many people with DS. The authors emphasize that their findings, combined with others’, shows that individuals with DS can keep improving their speech and intelligibility into their teen years and beyond.
