Emotion word production on the devices of nonspeaking school-aged autistic children who use augmentative and...

This study examined emotion word production on the augmentative and alternative communication devices of nonspeaking school-age autistic children classified as emerging communicators.

Emotion word vocabulary data were collected by enabling data logging on the augmentative and alternative communication devices of 11 autistic school-age children between 8-10 years of age over an 18-week period. We calculated the type and frequency of emotion words produced on participant's devices and compared the result to a previous research study investigating emotion word production in typically-developing children between 15 and 47 months of age and their mothers.

Data logging revealed that eight different emotion words (angry, excited, frustrated, happy, mad, proud, sad, and scared) were produced on participants' augmentative and alternative communication devices over the course of 126 days. The majority of these eight words emerge relatively early in development, and five of the words overlapped with the eight emotion words produced most frequently by the typically-developing children and mothers in previous research.

Overall, emotion words were produced in low frequencies on the participants' devices. Limited production of emotion words on children's augmentative and alternative communication devices (whether it be modelling by an adult or child production) will most likely slow acquisition of these complex words.