Systematic Physical Assistance During Intervention for People Who Use High-Tech Augmentative and Alternative Communication Systems: The Importance of Using a Common Vocabulary.

Purpose: Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) use prompting hierarchies to facilitate learning and monitor treatment progress. When working with people who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), SLPs typically use physical assistance to prompt motor learning. However, there is currently no standardization regarding the number of physical prompting levels or an operational definition for each prompting level. Clinicians and researchers may be working from different definitions; making treatment progress monitoring and intervention effectiveness comparisons across research studies is problematic.

Method: The purpose of this article is to illustrate the advantage of using the language in the Functional Independence Measure (FIM; Deutsch et al., 1996) to describe the level of physical assistance provided during AAC intervention and AAC intervention research for individuals who use high-tech AAC systems.

Results: Standardizing the level of physical assistance will provide important information regarding AAC learning that researchers may use as they continue to study the active ingredients of AAC intervention. Furthermore, standardizing the descriptions of physical assistance levels will enable clinicians to accurately describe a learner's performance.

Conclusion: This article describes how the language used in the FIM may be used by SLPs to provide a consistent, continuous, and systematic approach to fading the physical assistance used during AAC intervention to ultimately support independent use of high-tech AAC systems.