Read one of the following articles:
Words Say Little About Cognitive Abilities in Autism by Nicholette Zeliadt
Next, view Episode 1 of:
Speechless with Carly Fleischmann.
Think about your experience with non-verbal people. What augmented and alternative communication do they use? If you have the opportunity, observe how other people behave around non-verbal people—do they talk “around” them? Do they include them in the conversation?
Summary of the article, "Words Say Little About Cognitive Abilities in Autism" by Zeliadt:
According to the article, scientists have found difficulty categorizing children as non-verbal due to limitations and variations in testing tools. The article also shares that cognitive ability surpasses what most people assume cognitive ability is due to verbal deficits. “They found that regardless of the method used to classify children as minimally verbal, 43 to 52 percent of minimally verbal children have significantly higher nonverbal than verbal intelligence scores. By contrast, typically developing children tend to achieve similar scores on the verbal and nonverbal parts of intelligence tests, Bal says.” (Zeliadt, 2016) If verbal communication deficits are not due to cognitive challenges, we have to look at other possibilities. For instance, some children might have language problems due to not being able to imitate others or use parts of their mouth or face.
Reading the article and watching the interview Speechless with Carly Fleischmann makes me think about all of the possibilities for my student with ASD. Carly is hilarious! She is brave and confident, and I would love to have a friend like that. I wonder how she was introduced to this kind of communication. I don’t know any truly nonverbal people. My student used to be minimally verbal but has made big gains in verbal communication over the last year and a half.
Ignorantly, I might have assumed that this non-verbal person didn’t have strong receptive language skills. I might have assumed that cognitively she had some deficits because of her vocalizations, gestures, and stimming. I’m ashamed that I had made those kinds of assumptions, but I'm glad that my false assumptions are being challenged and that I'm learning so I can share what I have learned with others.
No comments:
Post a Comment