Acknowledgements

We would like to dedicate this website to all of the children and their families who participated in our research and thereby helped us to develop this intervention. Thank you so much for allowing us to be a part of your lives and for sharing your experiences with us so willingly. This project and this website would not have been possible without you. Your efforts will make a difference in the lives of other children with special needs and their families.

We are also very grateful to the Penn State undergraduate and graduate students and research associates who have worked on this project. We consider ourselves so fortunate to have the opportunity to work with such a talented group of individuals. We are especially grateful to the following individuals: Emily Angert, Julia Birmingham, Jacky Cammiso, Jessica Currall, Jen Curran, Courtney Devlin, Erinn Finke, Natalie Flick, Elizabeth Hayes, Melissa Ihrig, Jessica Johnson, Lauren Karg, Line Kristiansen, Heather Larson, Wendy Lewis, Ashley Marzzacco, Jen May, Holly May, Ashley Maurer, Rebecca Page, Elizabeth Panek, Sarah Pendergast, Kate Shapiro, Kate Shemeley, Nicole Sherman, Kristin Stoltzfus, Lisa Venzon, and Melissa Witte. Without these individuals this research would not have been realized.

We wish to acknowledge the federal funding that we received to support this project. This early intervention was developed and evaluated through a research grant (#H133E030018) funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) as part of the AAC-RERC. The contents do not necessarily represent the policy of NIDRR and you should not assume endorsement by the federal government.

We are grateful to Assistive Technologies, Inc (now Tobii Assistive Technologies, Inc. or Tobii ATI) for loaning us assistive technologies to use within this project so that we could involve additional participants and their families. We are also grateful to DynaVox Mayer-Johnson, Inc  for facilitating the programming of visual scene displays using Speaking Dynamically Pro software for this project and for allowing us to use Picture Communication Symbols (PCS) on this site.

This project is part of the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Communication Enhancement (The AAC-RERC). We have been privileged to be a part of the AAC-RERC and we are grateful for the feedback and support of our partners in the center.

The development of this intervention rests firmly on the shoulders of many scholars in the areas of early intervention and language development and disorders generally, and in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) specifically. We appreciate the efforts of these researchers who have worked diligently to advance knowledge and improve outcomes.


Janice Light and Kathy Drager
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
Penn State University