In-depth info on AIT?

a website set up by the mother of an autistic child. She kept a diary of his AIT experience that is posted at this address: http://www.ccnet.com/~njones/AIT.html. She also has a page listing different types of auditory disorders and their effects on behavior.

AIT is a sound therapy. Some professionals prefer other, milder versions of sound therapy such as Samonas or Tomatis. Sound therapy aims to “normalize” the processing of sounds to eliminate distortion. Many children with auditory problems have hyper-sensitivity to some frequencies and hypo-sensitivity to others.

Once a child has normalized hearing, a program such as FastForWord can be useful to develop efficiency at processing the sounds of speech. Website for that is http://www.scilearn.com. (FFW is a lot less expensive if the parent becomes a certified provider — which is fairly easy and inexpensive ($100) to do.)

Mary

Thanks Mary!

I checked out that website, and it sounds like it might be helpful for my friend’s son, so I emailed them the website. They had contacted me about doing FFW with their son, and I agree with you that he might need something preliminary to that. I’ve done FFW with other kids, and found it very stressful and intense, even for normal verbal kids, so I’m not sure how kids with a serious language disability would do with it. Has anyone else had experience using FFW with autistic or non-verbal, multiple handicapped children?

Sharon

(http://www.scilearn.com) used to have a forums area where there were quite a few posts about FFW being used with autistic children — mostly by parents who were doing it at home so they could take full advantage of doing it over an extended period of time. (It’s pretty easy for a parent to become a certified provider, and cheap — about $100. You can then work on FFW for up to a year, or even longer with permission from the company.) My understanding is that autistic children often enjoy repetitive computer tasks, so they tend to like doing FFW. Parents saw it as a means of working on language development, but whether or not it actually has an impact I don’t know. If those forums are still on the website, there may be feedback there from parents who used it and observed changes.

Mary

Mary,

My understanding is that the training kit is $100, but I don’t think you can access the full FFW program to actually use it with a child without paying the $850 licensing fee (per child).

Janis