Primary outcomes
Primary outcomes will be assessed 18 times in equidistant time points, every month, across 18 months. All the below described tests were developed by the first and second author. To the best of our knowledge, there are no such available tools in Norwegian to assess this population who uses AAC with demonstrated evidence of validity. They are centered on the following phonological awareness skills domains:Sound blending [score ranging from 0 to 10] measured by adapted tests in line with the reading material “Lesing for alle.” Researcher-designed test. Testing in sound blending involves testing the student’s ability to combine individual sounds into words. The students will see a sheet of paper with four symbols. In the instructions, the target word will be presented by expanding the individual sound in the word. For example, “sss-uuu-nnn.” The students have to listen to the sounds, put the sounds together in their head, and then point to the symbol that belongs to the word. This test consists of 10 tasks. The teacher will make no comments on the accuracy of student’s selections but just comment “good work” for the motivation.Example of one test task in sound blending:
Wigdit symbols [Letter-sound correspondence [score ranging from 0 to 25] measured by adapted tests in line with the reading material “Lesing for alle.” Researcher-designed test. Testing in letter-sound correspondence involves testing the student’s ability on the correspondence between the sounds of speech (phonemes) and the written letters that represent speech (graphemes). The instructor asks the student to choose, for example, the letter sound “Phoneme segmentation [score ranging from 0 to 10] measured by test in line with the reading material “Lesing for alle.” Researcher-designed test. Testing in phoneme segmentation tests the student’s ability to segment the first phoneme of the word (e.g., 