There is growing recognition of the communicative potential in many of the informal and idiosyncratic behaviors exhibited by children with developmental and physical disabilities. To assist in assessment and intervention planning, it would seem important to identify these potential communicative acts. To this end, the present article describes the development of the Inventory of Potential Communicative Acts (IPCA). The IPCA is an interview schedule designed to be completed by parents, teachers, and therapists of children with developmental and physical disabilities and severe communication impairment. It consists of 53 questions asking informants to indicate how the child communicates 10 distinct pragmatic functions. To date, pilot testing, development research, and field trials have involved 30 children.The results of this development work indicate that the IPCA is an efficient means of collecting accurate and verifiable data on the potential communicative acts of children with severe communication impairment associated with a range of developmental and physical disabilities. Use of the IPCA in communication assessment and intervention is discussed.

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The results suggest that parents can use FCT to enhance communication skills in children with developmental and physical disabilities.

We sought to verify teacher perceptions of prelinguistic behavior in 8 children with autism. Teachers were first interviewed using the structured protocol of the Inventory of Potential Communicative Acts (IPCA). The results showed that the teachers i n t e r p r e t e d ma n y o f t h e c h i l d r e n ' s g e s t u r e s , b o d y mo v e me n t s , a n d f a c i a l e x p r e s s i o n s as if these were forms of communication. Naturalistic and structured observations were then undertaken to verify whether these teacher-identified behaviors did in fact seem to serve a communicative function. Observational data provided evidence that teachers did indeed correctly interpret such acts as having a communication function.This suggests that the interview protocol may be one way to document the form and communication function of existing prelinguistic behaviors in children with autism who are at the early stages of communication development.

We assessed teacher responses to the communicative attempts of children with autism. Teachers were first interviewed using the Inventory of Potential Communicative Acts

Investigated 6 girls with Rett syndrome (RS), ages between 2 and 13 years, to provide comprehensive descriptions of their communicative behaviors. Previous studies have not focused on communicative competence nor on the intentionality of the language used by children with RS. This study concluded that all members of the group investigated were at a preintentional level of communication. Intentional communication has previously been reported to develop in normally developing and intellectually disabled children attaining Piagetian Sensorimotor Stage V in Means-End behavior. The present study also investigated the cognitive performance of the group. We concluded that the preintentional level of communication noted was consistent with the subjects' profound intellectual disability. No Means-End (i.e., purposeful) behavior beyond Piagetian Sensorimotor Stage III could be elicited from the 6 girls. The relevance of this study for therapeutic intervention is discussed.

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The Test of Language Competence-Expanded Edition (TLC-E) was administered to children and adults with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Relative to controls, those with ASD were less competent on a range of TLC-E tasks. No differences were found for either child or adult ASD groups on any of the TLC-E measures when re-classified as Asperger syndrome (AS) and high functioning autism (HFA) using DSM-IV language criterion. Hierarchical cluster analyses of individuals with ASD identified subgroups within the spectrum. The use of developmental language history as an identifying marker in autism is questioned. The findings suggest that comprehensive language assessments on individuals with ASD can provide clinically relevant information regarding the heterogeneity of language skills within the autistic spectrum.