Students who have little to no verbal communication are at a huge disadvantage in any situation leading to assumptions of mental retardation beyond what is often the case. In some cases, the students have more of a difficulty producing speech due to 'apraxia' or a motor impairment in piecing together the elements needed for speech, in other cases the problem is more related to a problem with accessing meaning through social cues. These are not mutually exclusive, but different tools might best get at the different issues that result.
The following is a list of the kinds of tools you will want to explore:
In this category we have a few tools that focus on different domains of impairment in the language skills of students who are verbal with ASD. Many of these students still suffer from difficulties understanding abstraction, particular more abstract syntactic or grammatical constructions. For these students, a program known as 'Grammar Trainer' has been shown to demonstrate results, focussing on written production in an interactive, on-line computer environment, but also demonstrating generalization to spoken language on standardized tests.
Another program that works on sentence level comprehension and production using video and 'chunking' of grammatical elements is called Teaching Language Concepts or TLC. The webpage will focus on descriptions with video and images to demonstrate how the program works.
Finally, there are several mobile apps for the ipod/ipad that work on sentence building, one is called Sentence Builder and the other is Expressionist.
Another area of impairment for ASD students is the ability to produce effective narrative speech that is connected and organized. In this area there are a number of Story building devices and interactive games, including TouchStory that have shown effective results in improving students ability to follow cause and effect in their construction of logical narratives. TouchStory was developed by Megan Davis and Kirsten Dautenham at University of Herfordshire. Please see Springer Journal Link and the following presentation on the Touchstory software.
There is more on emotional robots on the LIREC site, including information on several projects by Heather Knight, AKA 'Marilyn Monrobot' who is involved with the NAO project from Primus and Sensing Bears as well as other huggable and interactive robots. See recent paper Journal of Assistive Technology, March 2010 (edited by Sarah Parsons) and links to research on Robotics at the Aurora Project website.
Students with ASD also have difficulty in the area of conversation skills. Tools that help with this aspect of language might also be found in the 'Social Skills' tab (see work by D. Lucci and M. Levine at MGH) but they also can be trained within more of a language based framework using tools such as the "Puzzle Game" designed using a Diamond Touch Table to encourage conversation between conversation partners via an interactive object. This work is spearheaded by Tamar Weiss at University of Haifa and Alberto Battochi. See linked paper and link to Diamond Touch website.