Five teenagers with severe intellectual impairments and no discernible communication skills were enrolled in training to teach a conditional request for assistance using a speech-generating device (SGD). All were either blind or severely visually impaired since birth. All learned to operate an adaptive switch to control sensory outcomes, next…

Lumley and Miltenberger (1997) noted the paucity of empirical investigations involving teaching sexual-abuse-protection skills to people with intellectual disabilities. We reviewed relevant empirical investigations since 1997. Six studies trained sexual-abuse-protection skills, and two also included protection skills related to physical and verbal…

Drawing upon information about the Down syndrome behavioral phenotype and empirically based intervention strategies, we examined intervention addressing early communication impairments in young children with Down syndrome. Intervention involved multiple opportunities, shaping, prompting, and reinforcement to address both verbal imitation and…

Children with Williams syndrome (WS) have been reported to often face problems in daily communication and to have deficits in their pragmatic language abilities. To test this hypothesis, we examined whether children with WS could modify their verbal communication according to others' attention in order to share what they did. The children with WS…