Taylor is a bright 6 1/2 year old, who lives in Ocean County New Jersey. She has a diagnosis of cerebral palsy and is severely speech impaired. She has a great imagination and an advanced expressive vocabulary. She communicates using a DV4 with Gateway 60 in combination with her speech. Taylor has been using the DV4 for approximately 9 months. She attends a local special education school program.

Since she was 3 years of age, Taylor has been using an aided communication system. Her first boards were simple and contained less than 32 picture symbols. By the age of 4 she had a manual communication board that had over 100 picture symbols arranged in a Fitzgerald Key format. She used this board to express her needs and wants and to engage in structured play activities. Her messages typically contained 3-4 words. She also had a TechSpeak communication device that she used to communicate within her classroom.

In speech therapy, Taylor engaged in numerous play activities directed towards improving her expressive language performance. When she was 5, she also began using the DV4 in therapy with a focus on sorting out her most efficient means of access. Initially she was unable to direct select on the touch screen without numerous miss hits. Gradually her accuracy improved and she acquired her own device. Her initial setup was Gateway 40 with a keyguard.

Taylor made rapid progress in both access and in her expressive language development. She began forming sentences using present progressive verb tense, past tense, prepositions along with a variety of adjectives and adverbs. She no longer needed a keyguard and could select from a field of 60 symbols. Taylor moved up to the Gateway 60 page set.

Taylor is an effective communicator. Familiar listeners can understand her speech. Her spoken sentences are well-formed. Her MLU is 3-4 words in length with the device, during spontaneous use but syntactically correct during structured language activities. The difference in aided output reflects the challenges associated with accessing the device.

In addition to using Gateway 60 for spoken communication, Taylor has begun using her DV4 with the Access IT for written language activities. This is not only very motivating for her, but it is helping her improve her syntactical skills and compete with her peers as they too learn to write in their Journals. At 6, Taylor is an effective communicator.

Updated: 11/05