The effects of the DHACA method on expressive communication in children with autism spectrum disorder

Barbosa et al. (2025) tested a new AAC-to-speech method called DHACA. Twelve preschoolers with autism who had little or no spoken words joined the study. Each child got twenty DHACA sessions. The team watched to see who started talking and who could ask for more things.

Ten of the twelve children began to speak. Seven now talk out loud. Eight can ask for many items, not just one or two. Only two kids stayed non-verbal after the twenty lessons.

The 2012 meta-analysis by B et al. looked at thirteen PECS studies in the same age group. It said PECS works best when kids move through lots of phases. DHACA keeps that idea but adds a clear speech-fade step, so more kids end up talking.

Reni et al. (2022) ran a small PECS pilot with five non-verbal preschoolers. All five learned to hand over pictures, yet none were reported to speak. DHACA’s results seem bigger, but the kids in Reni’s study stayed with pictures only. The difference is the speech-fade part that DHACA adds.

Ganz et al. (2009) showed parents can teach PECS at home and still get new requests. DHACA has not tried parent delivery yet. If future work lets parents run DHACA, we might mix the best of both lines: parent power plus the speech-fade route.

If you work with preschoolers who have no words, DHACA gives you a twenty-session map from pictures to speech. You can start the protocol next week and track who hits spoken requests. Pair it with parent coaching if you want home practice, but keep the speech-fade steps in every session.