Nonverbal Language Skills

Nonverbal Assessment:
Student Characteristics

• Visual ability
• Auditory ability
• Mobility
• Positioning and posture (e.g., head control)
• Consistent motoric response mode(pointing)
• Ability to associate store and retrieve symbols and their meanings

Nonverbal Assessment: Communication System

• Physical abilities to manipulate the system
• Cognitive development required to communicate using the system
• Amount of training required of family and friends for communication to occur.
• Expected changes in student’s physical/skill levels over time

Nonoral Augmentative Systems

• Symbolic or aided systems
• Gestural or unaided systems

Symbolic or Aided Systems

• Representational

• Blissymbols, uses pictographs and ideographs

  Rebus: concrete, relational, abstract

• Abstract

• Non-SLIP: geometric shaped on colored tiles

• Language Codes

• Morse code: visual, motor limitations

  Traditional orthography: technological

Gestural or Unaided Systems

• Natural gestures

• prelinguistic signals without formal structure

  concrete concepts: pointing, shivering, waving

• Sign language

• ASL, American Sign Language

  Fingerspelling

  Combination gestural systems (total communication)

EDSE 552 Homepage