Effects of an Adapted Alphabetic Principle and Phonemic Awareness Intervention to Improve Spelling for Adolescents Who Use or Need Augmentative and Alternative Communication.

PURPOSE Learning the alphabetic principle (AP) and developing phonemic awareness (PA) are foundational skills for learning to spell. For individuals who use or need augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), spelling is vital as it increases communication through the independent generation of words or phrases. The current study aimed to teach AP and PA skills utilizing an adapted keyboard to adolescents who use AAC.

METHOD A single-case, concurrent, multiple-probe-across-participants design was employed. The outcome variables in the study included percentage correct of grapheme-phoneme correspondence; percentage correct of phoneme identification in beginning, middle, and final positions of trained and untrained words; percentage correct of typing graphemes corresponding to phonemes in beginning, middle, and final positions of trained and untrained words; and percentage correct of typed consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words and CVC word letter sequences.

RESULTS All three participants made substantial gains in every dependent variable, with medium and large statistically significant effects, and all students could generalize their skills to untrained words. Additionally, two of the three students learned to spell CVC words without being explicitly taught. These gains, across many skills, were observed only after an average of 10 hr of instruction.

CONCLUSIONS Findings from the study add to the evidence that individuals with minimal or no speech can learn foundational skills for spelling. Additional implications include considerations and adaptations when providing an adapted AP and PA intervention for learners who use or need AAC, such as modifying for nonspoken responses and using an AAC keyboard to support the acquisition of skills important for spelling and communicating through orthography.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.32117863.