Many children with severe developmental disabilities emit idiosyncratic gestures that may function as verbal operants (Sigafoos et al., 2000). This study examined the effectiveness of a functional analysis methodology to identify the variables responsible for gestures emitted by 2 young children with severe developmental disabilities. Potential…

The functions of an American Sign Language response were experimentally evaluated with a young boy diagnosed with autism. A functional analysis procedure based on that reported by Lerman et al. (2005) was used to evaluate whether the target sign response would occur under mand, tact, mimetic, or control conditions. The target sign was observed…