Some children are highly visual learners. For these children, pairing a picture or symbol with spoken language can be super helpful for giving these children a way to communicate. This may be a bit different than what you expected. Most children get language models at every turn. From you guys talking to cartoons and songs, they are constantly being exposed to language and without it even being intentional, being told “this is how you communicate.”
For our AAC users, we must be a bit more intentional in telling them “This is how you communicate.” Modeling is an intentional way of doing this. “Aided language stimulation” is just a fancy way of saying that we want you to use your child’s communication system to communicate with them. According to research, most children who use AAC devices understand spoken language well. Overall, if we do not model language for them the way they are able to express it, it is remarkably like asking them to speak Chinese without teaching them how to do it.
Some of these methods are fairly easy for parents to do.
We want to provide more comments than questions with a ratio of about 8 to 2, and we want to provide symbols with our speech as often as possible. Find a couple of times in your day to intentionally model for your child. Meals, play times, bath, and story times are excellent places to start. We are not asking that you reduce the amount of verbal modeling but rather, to enrich it by pointing to signs and symbols as well. Several studies have shown the benefits of modeling AAC to young children. Using these methods, we have seen progress in both what children can say (verbally and using AAC) as well as what they can understand.
Speech Without Limits has a wonderful series with different areas and ideas for modeling. Here's a short one on modeling in the kitchen!!
