A Marsden Award, providing funding of $295,000 per year for three years, was granted to Professor Jeff Sigafoos from Victoria University of Wellington and Dr Dean Sutherland from Canterbury University to undertake research with 40 children with autism. The funding will be used to develop new and more effective methods for addressing the communication needs of children with autism.

Autism is a severe disability affecting one in every 150 children. Approximately 50 percent of these children will fail to develop speech. Without an alternative to speech, these children are significantly disadvantaged.

Manual signing, picture-exchange communication, and electronic speech-generating devices have all been proposed as possible alternatives to speech, but there is considerable debate as to which of these three communication options is best suited to children with autism.

This project will explore the intriguing possibilities that children with autism might prefer one option to others and that accommodating such preferences will enhance the children's communication development.

This newly funded Marsden project aims to develop effective procedures for assessing children's preferences for the three different forms of alternative communication and determine the effects of incorporating such preferences into the children's communication therapy programmes. Professor Sigafoos and Dr Sutherland have hypothesised that children will show idiosyncratic preferences for different forms of alternative communication and that use of the child's most preferred option will improve the acquisition and maintenance of alternative communication skills. Confirmation of these hypotheses could pave the way for applying similar preference-enhanced approaches to other areas of child therapy, such as academic problems, conduct disorders, obesity, and phobias.

Professor Sigafoos is delighted with receiving the award. "The Marsden Award will enable us to develop and extend our research into autism with the prospect of improving the lives of autistic children. This is a very exciting development for us."

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