In school, but "locked out": 13 youth, each with fewer than 10 productive words to use to build their relationship with families, teachers, and friends. That is, until they were introduced to the System for Augmenting Language, or SAL. In a wonderful meshing of science and the real world, this remarkable book chronicles the process of language learning through augmented means for people who have significant difficulty acquiring spoken language.

In engaging storytelling style, speech-language pathologist Romski and psychologist Sevcik describe how they carried their research from language lab to school and in the process changed the lives of the youth to whom they brought the SAL. A replicable system that fosters naturalistic exchanges between communicative partners using electronic speech-output devices, the SAL extends the power of communication to children otherwise locked out of the world around them. With a new level of vocabulary mastery, students enjoy not only enhanced communicative skills but also higher judgments of competence from both familiar and unfamiliar observers. One award-winning SAL application, Project FACTT (Facilitating Augmentative Communication Through Technology) provides innovative augmentative communication services to school-age children with severe disabilities and is described in detail.

What does the latest research tell us about communication interventions for people with severe disabilities? Find out in this authoritative research volume, which investigates the effectiveness of today's communication interventions, synthesizes evidence from current studies, and identifies urgent research directions for the future. Shaped by a conference of The National Joint Committee on the Communication Needs of Persons with Severe Disabilities (NJC), this interdisciplinary book includes contributions from more than 30 top scholars from diverse fields, including psychology, special education, and speech language pathology. Each chapter gives readers a brief summary of research studies on a key intervention topic, insights on research design and measurement challenges, thoughts on future advances, and real-world clinical and educational recommendations. Essential for the reference libraries of educators and professionals, this book offers powerful insights about today's communication interventions-and sets a clear agenda for tomorrow's groundbreaking research Topics Included: prelinguistic communication intervention for young children with intellectual disabilities challenging behavior and communicative alternatives interventions for children who are deafblind augmented language interventions for children with severe disabilities parents as partners in communication intervention the role of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic differences targeted and phenotypic communication interventions for children with Down syndrome or ASD issues related to research study design, including sample size, the effectiveness of randomized controlled trials, and integration of single-case and group designs assessment and measurement of communication and language skills in individuals with severe intellectual disabilities and more The NJC conference was funded by the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders .