After graduating in Special Education at CUNY, New York, I moved back to Italy and completed the BACB course sequence receiving my BCBA certification in 2010. Currently I teach in several courses for BCBA and BCaBA in Italy, Croatia and Latvia and supervise students. I’m vice president of SIACSA (the Italian Association of Applied and Experimental Analysis) but mainly I work as an ABA provider at the Center for children and young adults with autism and other disabilities that I co-founded in Florence, Italy.
Presenting at the Bucharest International ABA Conference 2018:
Functional Communication using tablets with speech generating device for adolescent with autism: strengths and limitations.
It is estimated that 25 to 61 % of persons with autism fail to develop functional speech (Weitz et al. 1997). Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems, such as picture exchange (PE) and speech generating devices (SGD) have been shown to be effective in teaching individuals with autism to acquire a communicative (e.g., mand) repertoire (Goldstein 2002; Rispoli et al. 2010; Lancioni et al. 2007; Mirenda 2003).It has been suggested that in comparison to AAC systems without speech output, SGDs might provide particular advantages for increasing vocal speech (Blischak et al., 2003; Kasari et al., 2014; Schlosser & Wendt, 2008).The focus of this study was to investigate the possible relation between the introduction of the Ipad based SGD and the number of different and new Mands emitted for two adolescent with autism and verbal vocal skills but poor articulation. Additionally we investigated the effects of the introduction of a SGD on their vocal mands.
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