Preservice Professionals' Attitudes toward Children who use Augmentative/Alternative Communication

Abstract

A scale to measure the attitudes of professionals towards children who communicate using augmentative/alternative communication (AAC) was validated. An experiment was conducted to investigate the influence of three variables (type of augmentative technique used to communicate, disability label used to describe the AAC user, and AAC user competence in communicating with an augmentative technique) on adult attitudes. Although findings indicate that user competence influenced cognitive evaluations (i.e., judgments relating to overall capabilities), user competence did not influence affective evaluations (i.e., feelings, emotional responses), behavioral intent (i.e., actions one would take when serving a child), or overall attitudes. There was no evidence to suggest that adult attitudes were influenced by the type of device (high-technology or low-technology) used by a child or by a child's disability label (mental retardation, physical disability, or no label). Clinical implications of these findings and need for further research are discussed.