Shared interactive book reading (SIBR) is a broad term used to describe the act of adults reading aloud to children, while encouraging interaction by asking questions and engaging in a discussion about the book. SIBR can be used to embed naturalistic communication teaching strategies, creating learning opportunities to promote a child's language…

Researchers and practitioners have found that telepractice is an effective means of increasing access to high-quality services that meet children's unique needs and is a viable mechanism to deliver speech-language services for multiple purposes. We offer a framework to facilitate the implementation of practices that are used in direct…

Children with developmental disabilities (DD) may experience delays in their ability to speak and communicate with their parents, peers, and others. These children often benefit from evidence-based, parent-implemented communication interventions. In the current study, two mothers were trained and coached to use storybook reading techniques and…

Interventions designed for children with disabilities and their families should be socially valid. Parent-implemented Communication Strategies-Storybook (PiCSS) is an intervention package designed to coach parents on shared storybook reading and naturalistic teaching strategies. In PiCSS program, the participating parents used the communication…

Training and coaching are cited frequently to achieve different goals, by different people, across different fields. "Who" provides training and coaching and "where" and "how" they are provided may influence the effectiveness of the training and coaching efforts, making the clear identification of these contextual…

We conducted a multiattribute utility (MAU) evaluation to assess the Parent-Implemented Communication Strategies (PiCS) project which was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). In the PiCS project parents of young children with developmental disabilities are trained and coached in their homes on naturalistic and visual teaching…

The purpose of this paper is to describe a pilot program (i.e., Internet-Based Parent-Implemented Communication Strategies [i-PiCS] program) that provides long-distance training and coaching via the Internet to parents of young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The i-PiCS program is designed to teach parents how to use evidence-based…

Many individuals with developmental disabilities show delays in the development of sophisticated communication skills. Listeners often misunderstand their unconventional means of communication, and breakdowns occur. A "communication repair" is a second attempt to communicate a message when a breakdown is encountered. Qualitative methods were…

One of the challenges for young children with communication disabilities and limited expressive language is learning to communicate in effective ways. Often, children communicate using idiosyncratic behavior and unconventional means. Their communication may even mirror that of very young children who are prelinguistic (e.g., reach for an item or…

A communicative repair has been defined as the ability to persist in communication and to modify, repeat, or revise a signal when the initial communication attempt failed. From an operant perspective, initial communicative acts and communicative repairs can be considered members of a response class in which each response produces the same outcome.…