Help for individuals with autism

For those children on the autism spectrum who can speak, many will need specific help to develop vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure. As you look through our website, you will find materials specifically designed to develop a number of these important skills. For example, the Dog is Barking DVD is an excellent resource to help children learn about sounds, words, and sentences. The I Can Say It Calendar will help develop lots of vocabulary and time concepts. From very early on, it is beneficial to highlight sounds in words using the multisensory Phoneme Touch & Say™ hand cues. You will find a variety of materials that incorporate Phoneme Touch & Say™ hand cues to provide important multisensory information, a key to learning for children on the autism spectrum.

Language delay is a hallmark feature of the learning profile of individuals on the Autism Spectrum. Although it is possible there are a variety of factors resulting in lack of speech development, some researchers and clinicians believe many non-verbal children with autism have difficulty with motor programming, (also called verbal apraxia). According to speech-language pathologist, Martha Weiner, "when strategies used to teach childhood verbal apraxia of speech are integrated into a structured intensive program, non-verbal children with ASD can be taught to speak. Many parents, educators and therapists are unfamiliar with how to develop speech skills, focusing instead on augmentative systems in the hope that speech might follow. ...that often does not happen". 1
In order to help non-verbal children with autism learn to speak, it is important to specifically work on developing speech. Intensive, targeted therapy is indicated. In order to reduce task demands, imitation of single speech sounds (as in Touch & Say Sounds Starter 1 DVD) is a good place to start.
Although individuals on the autism spectrum tend to have difficulty with verbal working memory (also called short term auditory memory), they fortunately tend to have a relative strength remembering visual information. So we can use this strength to help children make sense of the challenging stream of sounds they encounter with spoken information.
Phoneme Touch & Say™ is a system of multisensory hand cues that highlights sounds visually and through touch, making learning about sounds explicit and giving the child support to navigate the confusing stream of spoken language.
Initial research using Phoneme Touch & Say™ with children with autism is promising. Dr. A. Kotsopoulos reported on the development of speech in four children with autism: "In response to PTS all children made significant gains, at varying speed, in phoneme recognition and articulation. … All children showed improvement in joint attention and imitation." 3
Video modeling has proven to be particularly effective in teaching children with autism as summarized by Marjorie H. Charlop-Christy: "Results suggest that video modeling led to faster acquisition of tasks than in vivo modeling and was effective in promoting generalization." 4
Many of the Learning Language Together™ materials include videos/DVDs to teach speech and language skills.
1.  http://asa.confex.com/asa/2006/techprogram/S2011.HTM
2.  http://www.dsm5.org/ProposedRevisions/Pages/proposedrevision.aspx?rid=94#
3.  http://www.learninglanguagetogether.com/Kotsopoulos-autism-research.pdf
4.  http://www.springerlink.com/content/lt1411t19568257q/