Augmentative communication: a perspective for pediatricians.

This article has described the rationale and methods available for treatment of severely communicatively impaired children. The primary goal of such intervention is to facilitate communication, rather than speech per se, as the most realistic goal for some youngsters. To the extent that augmentative techniques affect speech development, however, they have been shown to exert a facilitory, rather than inhibitory, effect. The relatively new phenomenon of aided augmentative communication for non-speaking youngsters is still in its infancy. Service professionals in the medical, clinical, and research fields must continue to discern ways to practically apply these instruments to the task of human communication interchange.