This week, we share five brief “small talks”, or short interviews, with Mark Brown, Meryl Schnapp, Jennifer Edge Savage, Kim Albrecht, & Colleen Warn!

Before the interviews, Chris and Rachel have an amazing discussion about targeting spontaneous language when people do not communicate much without a prompt or model. For example, you can help parents and teachers realize how much (or little) their child/student communicates spontaneously by having them track it during the day. Making sure to give appropriate wait time and finding something that is motivating are also essential to encouraging independent initiation. 

Small Talks This Episode:

🗣️Mark Brown discusses 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, and how we can better support them through AAC during early language development. With 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, language is delayed and there can be cognition deficits. There can also be VP insufficiency which creates hypernasal resonance and impacts articulation and intelligibility. AAC can be used as an interim support before they are more intelligible. 

🗣️Meryl Schnapp shares about using 3d printed tactile core symbols, and her efforts to create large classroom sized core board with tactile symbols that are always put in a consistent location, because it would be frustrating to dig through a basket of objects every time you wanted to say a word. 

🗣️Jennifer Edge Savage talks about starting AAC Town Halls during the pandemic while working for northeast PRC-Saltillo.  They had a lot of SLPs sharing resources with each other about things that were new or different during remote learning, like AAC tele-assessment. 

🗣️Kim Albrecht talks about making her home the local “grand central station” for the neighborhood kids, which is really good exposure for her daughter Miranda.

🗣️Coleen Warn discusses working to create asynchronous learning experiences for people. They developed a bunch of screencasts that are only about 2-5 minutes long that cover different aspects of different AAC tools to encourage people to learn more about their devices.

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