I met with a parent last week who said her son loves to watch these movies and is particularly fascinated with one character: Soundwave. Soundwave is a transformer that doesn’t use his own novel utterances to communicate, but instead channels radio waves and other types of communicate to repeat and use them in seemingly appropriate times.  This mom made the connection to the echolalia that her son uses to communicate all the time.  He can appear to be a very successful communicator in some contexts – he is very verbal and even literate. However, the things he says are rarely “his own” but rather delayed echolalia using rote memorized passages from movies, scripts, shows, and frequent communications with others.  He can appear to be quite competent at times, which makes him an easy candidate to miss as a potential AAC user. Luckily his school team and family realized that he has the potential for so much more and can really build on his ability not only to get his needs met to but to connect with others socially and share information by using an AAC device.  Use of the DynaVox Xpress is already beginning to provide him with appropriate language use messages that he can employ verbally in a variety of contexts!