Stages of Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS)

PECS begins by teaching the child to give a picture of the desired item to a communication partner, who immediately honors the exchange as a request.

The system goes on to teach discrimination of pictures and how to put them together to form phrases and sentences.

In the more advanced phases, children are taught to respond to questions and spontaneously comment.

The phases of PECS

Phase I:

How to Communicate

Students learn how to exchange single pictures for items or activities that they want. The communication partner must find out what the child has an interest in so that he or she isn’t prompted into asking for something they don’t like. We should never make PECS aversive.

Phase II:

Distance and Persistence

Still using single pictures, students learn to generalize this new skill by using it in different places, with different people, and across distances. This phase is also utilized to expand the spontaneity of the child.

Phase III:

Picture Discrimination

Students learn to select from two or more pictures to ask for their favorite things. These favorite things are placed in a communication book- a three-ring binder with Velcro strips where pictures are stored and easily removed for communication.

Phase IV:

Sentence Structure

Students seek out their PECS board and learn to construct simple sentences on a detachable sentence strip using an “I want” picture followed by a picture of the item being requested. Students then seek out a communicative partner and give him or her the sentence strip. Listeners read the strip back to the child, inserting a fixed time delay between the words “I want” and the item label. Additional social praise is added if a child independently provides the label during the delay.

At this point, students begin to learn to expand their sentences by adding adjectives, verbs, and prepositions.

Phase V:

Answering a direct question

Students learn to use PECS to answer the question, “What do you want?”

Phase VI:

Commenting

Now students are taught to comment in response to questions such as, “What do you see?”, “What do you hear?” and “What is it?” They learn to make up sentences starting with “I see,” “I hear,” “I feel,” “It is a,” etc.