Professors in the Department of Communication Disorders at UMass-Amherst recently received a four-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education to educate and train graduate students in working with children who have Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). According to the UMass Daily Collegian, the professors received a total of $730,000 for the cause.

Associate Professor of Communication Disorders of UMass Shelley Velleman led the team of professors in promoting the training program. Velleman decided to promote the cause after she learned that the diagnosis of ASD had increased dramatically in the U.S. over the past few decades. ASD is a general term that encompasses autism and other syndromes with similar characteristics. The syndromes cause difficulties in the development of language, social and physical skills. These syndromes are also manifested in abnormal responses to various combinations of sensory input.

Mary Andrianopoulos, Christina Foreman and Elena Zaretsky, other associate professors within the communication disorders department, worked closely with Velleman. According to the Collegian, these professors collaborated with Dr. Mary Lynn Boscardin, a professor of special education, to discuss and achieve the objectives of the grant.

Velleman claims that this new training program will change the way language skills are taught to children with autism. According to Velleman, currently 50 percent of autistic children cannot communicate orally and consequently depend on sign language. Velleman explains that the new program will seek to change these statistics by teaching speech-language pathology graduate students how to assess and treat children with ASD-related speech problems.

"It is our belief that the appropriate assessment and remediation of individuals with ASD hinges on training school personnel, especially speech-language pathologists, to properly determine the nature of the children's speech deficits and to tailor their interventions accordingly," said Velleman to the Collegian.

Program participants will be trained through specialized course work, training seminars and workshops. They will also be exposed to the real world by working with children with ASD from Amherst, Chicopee, Holyoke and Springfield. Over the course of the next four years, participants will work with between 75 and 100 children with ASD in an on-campus clinic and at the children's schools. The program will eventually become part of the communications disorders curriculum at UMass.