Research: Effects on Communicative Requesting and Speech Development of the Picture Exchange Communication System in Children with Characteristics of Autism

This article describes a research study showing that the picture-exchange communication system (PECS) helps some children with autism develop speech.

The study focuses on three children (3-7 years old) who had been diagnosed with either autism or developmental delays with the characteristics of autism. Each child had 2-5 PECS training sessions per week until the child was able to communicate using sentence cards (phase 4 of PECS training phases, described in the PECS fact sheet). The authors noted that all three children were able to use PECS with several communication partners, not just the adults who had trained them. The training sessions were videotaped, and observers scored each childâ??s speech in terms of the number of words and non-words used. For all three children, by the beginning of phase 4, more words were spoken in each PECS training session than in previous sessions. Also, for two of the three children, the number of non-words spoken had decreased by phase 4.