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…

Results indicated that the two treatment conditions (speech and speech-sign) did not differ significantly for either learning or generalization with 10 Down's Syndrome three-seven year olds. The data did, however, indicate that individual patterns of acquisition were evident among the children. Caution is advised concerning automatic adoption or…

The authors address several issues pertinent to designing environmentally based total communication assessment and training programs for language delayed hearing children for whom oral language training alone is inadequate. (Author/CL)

Two experiments involving a seven-year-old trainable developmentally retarded boy demonstrated the effectiveness of an integrative language training model on the S's functional use of sign language. The model relied on delay and incidental teaching. (CL)

Four nonverbal autistic boys (ages 11-16) were successfully taught sign language action-object phrases following an intervention composed of prompting, fading, stimulus rotation, and differential reinforcement. The skill generalized to new situations. (Author/DB)

Research on generalized instruction following suggested that strategies employing linguistic elements (verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc.) arranged in systematic combination matrices were successful in producing generalized and novel responses among three moderately to severely retarded six and seven year old children. (Author)

This study of four moderately to severely aphasic subjects found that success in manual sign training programs is related to severity of aphasia, that aphasic subjects' propositional use of manual signs rarely follows simple acquisition, and that generalization to untrained stimuli or environments does not occur without additional training.…