Name: The Views of People with Rett Syndrome Regarding Communication and Literacy
Start: 2025-11-06T09:45:00-0500
End: 2025-11-06T11:00:00-0500

Registration Overview

Act now! We reach capacity and sell out every year.
Registration closes Friday, October 24, 2025 — or sooner if capacity is reached.

Ticket Options

#TalkingAAC: Pre-Conference Workshop
Wednesday, November 5, 2025 | 12:00–4:00 PM
Kellogg Center, East Lansing, MI
- Choose one 4-hour workshop
- Cost: $100
- Full details: talkingaac.org/preconference.html
#TalkingAAC: Two-Day Conference
Thursday & Friday, November 6–7, 2025
- Build your schedule for this two-day event
- Cost: $275
- Price includes breakfast, lunch, & parking

NOTE: To attend all 3 days, you must purchase both a Pre-Conference Workshop ticket and a Two-Day Conference ticket.

Registration & Session Planning

All registration and session planning will be handled via Sched:

Click the green Log In or Sign Up button below to access Sched.
Then proceed to purchase your ticket(s).
After you’ve purchased your ticket(s), you can plan which sessions you’d like to attend.

Meals, Parking, & Lodging Meals (Included with Two-Day Conference)

Continental Breakfast – Thursday & Friday
Lunch & Drink – Thursday & Friday

Parking (Included)

Overnight Guests:
Get your parking pass at hotel check-in and display it on your dashboard.
Non-Overnight Guests:
- Register your vehicle on-site via QR code (posted near registration).
- Bring your license plate number.
- Do not register your vehicle more than once per day.

Note: Please consider carpooling to reduce on-campus traffic.

Lodging

View the 2025 Lodging Options for hotel blocks and discount codes.
Reminder: Pre-Conference Workshops begin at 12:00 PM on Nov. 5 to allow extra travel time.

Terms & Conditions

#TalkingAAC is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization established for continued education.

Refunds & Ticket Transfers

Refunds available up to 10 days before the event (Sched & Stripe fees are non-refundable).
Ticket transfers (e.g., to a coworker) may be approved before October 24, 2025.

Continuing Education

All attendees will receive a Certificate of Attendance.
Note for 2025: SCECH hours will not be offered this year.
ASHA CEUs are not provided. SLPs will receive a Verification of Attendance form to self-report professional learning hours to ASHA.

Networking & Swag

Networking Event – Details coming soon!
Merchandise – #TalkingAAC gear available for purchase on-site.

Stay Informed

Watch for updates from #TalkingAAC and Sched with session details and reminders as the event approaches.

Questions?

www.talkingaac.org
info@talkingaac.org

517-299-5200

Thursday November 6, 2025 9:45am - 11:00am EST

Previous research on the expressive communication abilities of people with Rett syndrome (a rare, neurodevelopmental disorder occurring 1 in 10,000 female births; Neul et al., 2014) has mostly utilized experimental and quasi-experimental approaches. These reports reveal that people with Rett syndrome intentionally communicate, often using their eyes (Bartolotta et al., 2011) and other forms of unconventional communication (Didden et al., 2010). Although at least some people with Rett syndrome are reported to use conventional symbolic communication using various forms of augmentative and alternative communication (Grether, 2018; Urbanowicz et al., 2018; Vessoyan et al., 2018).

The literacy abilities of children with Rett syndrome are mostly unknown, with some reports of children reading at the single word level (Bartolotta et al., 2011) and other reports of children identifying letters and segmenting words into syllables (Fabio et al., 2013). However, parents report that their children with Rett syndrome have greater abilities than are recognized by others (Bartolotta et al., 2011; Urbanowicz et al., 2016), and professionals who work with this population report that the potential for children with Rett syndrome to communicate is largely underestimated (Townend et al., 2020). To understand the inconsistency between the published reports of the abilities of people with Rett syndrome and real-time observations, I designed a qualitative study to interview three young people with Rett syndrome on their self-perceptions and experiences with communication, reading, and writing.

Results of Talking Mats interviews, direct observations of the participations, field notes, and detailed case histories revealed that the participants have clear preferences and self-perceptions about expressive communication and literacy. Convergent themes across the three participants included adaptable multimodal communication, incongruent views of communication and literacy abilities, and resilience. Specifically, the three participants demonstrated strategic use of both systematic and idiosyncratic communication (Doak, 2023) which has not previously been explored in this population. Lastly, across the cases, all participants responded in ways that suggest that although they are skillful symbolic communicators who use high-tech augmentative and alternative communication systems, they may prefer that communication partners attend to their embodied communication attempts.

Within the three cases, themes reflecting unique communication abilities were revealed. This work has implications for clinical decisions for speech-language pathologists and educators who provide language and literacy interventions for people with Rett syndrome. This session will describe a novel approach to understanding the expressive communication and literacy abilities of young people with Rett syndrome. Participants will learn how a Talking Mats (Murphy & Cameron, 2008) approach was used to adapt traditional interview procedures. Detailed descriptions of findings across and within participants will be presented to fully appreciate the heterogeneity of abilities represented in Rett syndrome. Results of the interviews, including salient video clips, will be presented along with clinical implications of the findings.

Presenters

Andrea Etkie, PhD, CCC-SLP

Assistant Professor, Faulkner University

Andrea Etkie, PhD, CCC-SLP is an assistant professor at Faulkner University and a speech-language pathologist specializing in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) and Rett syndrome. Her clinical work since 2014 inspired her research interests in language and literacy interventions... Read More →

Thursday November 6, 2025 9:45am - 11:00am EST

General Session

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#TalkingAAC 2025

Andrea Etkie, PhD, CCC-SLP

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#TalkingAAC 2025

Andrea Etkie, PhD, CCC-SLP

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