Niki, age14, has a diagnosis of cerebral palsy. She is fully included in regular school classes in her hometown in central New Jersey. Niki came to the United States with her family, when she was 3 years old. Russian is her native language. Gaining communicative competence in a second language is an achievement for a child who can speak, but it is an incredible feat for a child dependent upon AAC.

Niki's introduction to AAC was through a picture communication board designed in a Fitzgerald Key format. Her first AAC device was a DigiVox, which she received at age 4. She used the DigiVox to enhance her participation in the classroom. A majority of her early language intervention activities were mediated through her manual boards. These boards increased in complexity as her syntactical skills progressed.

At age 6, Niki received an age appropriate score on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, a test of receptive vocabulary. In speech therapy she was learning to form the past tense of regular and irregular verbs and to coordinate sentences. She received a DynaVox2c and began using Gateway 54 to enhance her language and learning performance.

One year later, at age 7, her scores for both receptive vocabulary and language comprehension exceeded her chronological age. Niki was a competent communicator! Three years later she received a DynaVox 3100 and progressed to Gateway 75. As a competent speller, she complemented her use of Gateway's single word vocabulary by spelling and using word prediction.

Niki's communicative competence enabled her to demonstrate her mastery of required educational competencies. Throughout grade school, Niki has consistently been named to the Honor Roll.

In the 2004 Camp Chatterbox program, in her role as a candidate in the M.O.D.E.L. Political Party, Niki was presented with the challenge of defining some of the characteristics of a successful person. Her closing is an accurate reflection of her performance.

“Hello, Ola, Priviet! My name is Niki. I am learned and intelligent in school and in everything I do. I know three languages - English, Spanish and Russian. I am successful in life.”

Updated: 11/05