Requesting/ Mand Immersion 2: PECS

We've been trying to make this video for a while, thank you to Daddy Paddy for making it happen, and congrats to you and Moose on your YouTube debut 🕺🐶🕺 Vocal verbal behaviour, or spoken speech and language, is always a priority goal in early intervention. Along with Sign Language, PECS and similar picture exchange methods are a type of Alternative and Augmentative Communication (AAC) that can help this along. By themselves, AAC are an incredibly valuable tool in allowing the learner to communicate their needs and wants, reducing frustration and challenging behaviour. But they are also a useful tool in teaching vocal verbal behaviour, as we see here. ➡️ Assessing or establishing motivation is the key to manding or requesting programs. You must have options available that the learner actually wants, you must follow their lead, and the reward you deliver must be specific or match what they asked for. ➡️ PECS is not a many or choice board; pointing is not enough. There are 2 partners in the conversation, and some form of social interaction or exchange needs to take place between them. ➡️ Although the official PECS manual calls for 2 teachers and a fancy 4-step correction procedure, it is possible to run PECS by yourself at home! Dont be intimated into avoiding a procedure, get into the thick of it! Here you can see the use of graduated guidance and time delay, fading in and out as you assess how the learner is managing with the task. ➡️ The movement of the icons to your face can act as a nice prompt for eye contact. Not all programs require eye contact, but attending to the face can be an important prerequisite in future skills such as pronunciation or social skills. It's worth considering whether eye contact is something you think the learner is able to include in their language responses; if not is this something you can work on first? (see Level 1 video with Lilla) ➡️ Auditory bombardment or pairing of the word with the item - "Grapes! Grapes, Grapes!" This goes back to an idea in the first video on PECS, that it helps to act as a filter and focus on 1 word. Having the name you will all use typed on the icon is another helpful way to increase the salience of the target. ➡️ Reinforcing differentially - better efforts or attempts towards your ultimate goal result in bigger rewards or payouts. Needed full physical prompts to make a request? 1 grape. Said "Grape"? Give the whole bowl! One final thought - my aim in creating these videos is to show parents, caregivers and therapists how they can use ABA in their own homes. I am purposely using nontechnical language to reach as many people as possible, not impress or show off my fancy lingo, as per the BACB Task list G-04. There's a huge amount of pressure in our field to talk about things like SCC; for me it's important to take a step back and get the basics right.