Event Type: Lecture

Speaker Information: Nancy Brady

Individuals with severe disabilities frequently rely on nonverbal and nonsymbolic means to communicate. Dr. Brady will present her research on the development of novel ways to assess and treat nonsymbolic communication. She and her team of investigators have been validating a tool called the Communication Complexity Scale that applies the developmental continuum of prelinguistic communication to individuals with minimal verbal skills associated with a variety of diagnoses such as autism, cerebral palsy, deaf-blindness, and intellectual disability. Currently, teachers and SLPs are learning to assess children with the CCS as part of an ongoing project funded by the Institute of Educational Sciences. The CCS is a strength-based assessment that can be used to show progress in communication intervention such as the multimodal intervention currently under investigation by Brady and colleagues. In this talk, Brady will describe the components of the multimodal approach and share video examples and data from a pilot study. To date, approximately half of the participants have responded to this intervention and we will discuss characteristics that seem to be associated with these positive responders.

Cost: Free and Open to the Public

Contact: Hedda Meadan217-333-0260
meadan@illinois.edu

Sponsor: College of Education