Disney clips teach autistic Galway twins how to talk

Date Published: 29-Nov-2012

BY MICHELLE MCDONAGH

When twins Eoin and Conor Dodd were diagnosed with severe autism and cognitive problems as toddlers, their future appeared bleak. Their condition was so severe that their parents were told the boys would likely need institutionalised care by their early teens.

However, Enda and Valerie Dodd were not prepared to give up so easily on the children they had waited eleven long years for.

“Although we were aware of their diagnosis, the boys appeared to be quite intelligent to us,” Enda explains. They were well able to hide and find things, unlock doors and get out of the house. There appeared to be something inside, we just had to figure out a way of accessing their minds.”

The Dodds relocated from Galway to the San Francisco Bay area in an attempt to find some way of lifting the twins out of the isolation of autism.

With Enda’s experience in applied medical research and Valerie’s as a school teacher, they worked with researchers at the University of California to unravel the mysteries of their children’s language deficits. The result is Animated Language Learning (ALL), a state-of-the-art visually based language learning programme that uses clips from popular Disney Pixar movies like Toy Story to help autistic kids learn how to speak.

“While the boys had difficulties communicating, they were very intelligent visually and had substantial problem solving capabilities. My thinking was that if they could think visually, then we could grow them visually. When I asked myself what was the most powerful image for six year old children, straight away I thought of Disney Pixar,” Enda says.

Dodd, who has full access to the entire Disney Pixar archive for his research, found he could take the images from such well-loved movies as Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Cars and Monsters Inc and attach a language or method of communication to them.

The boys went from having no language at all until the age of nine or ten to suddenly learning how to attach concepts to the images they were looking at and learning how to speak. They then developed the ability to hear and understand language — the opposite of the normal path of learning language in children.

“The boys are now 15 years old. For a child who did not speak for his first nine or ten years, Eoin would now talk the hind legs off a donkey and is at peer level in terms of his language abilities. Conor now has the literacy of an eight or nine year old child and we are focusing on continuing to develop his speech and listening skills over the next year.”

Once a pilot study is complete and Dodd is absolutely satisfied it works as an effective learning intervention in the homes of children with autism and learning disorders, he will release the software commercially and come to a royalty arrangement with Disney Pixar.

“We believe we have found the right mechanism to access the minds of these children. We have the ability to deliver something at a fraction of the cost of existing interventions, but on a hugely more powerful level. I credit the technology, you just click on the desktop to open the software and let the programme run.”

For further information, go to www.animatedlanguagelearning.com

For more on this story, see the Galway City Tribune.