Six autistic children were trained to use their sign repertoire to make spontaneous requests of adults. Training consisted of imitative prompting, fading, and differential reinforcement, with aspects of incidental teaching. Ss displayed increased rate and variety of spontaneous sign requests and generalization of spontaneity across different…

Five children with severe educational retardation, aged 5-12, were involved in sign training in which the spoken words corresponding to signs were receptively known to participants. Whether signs were taught concurrently or in a serial fashion, signs taught by total communication were acquired faster than those taught by sign-alone training.…