The traditional recommendation for sequencing speaker and listener instruction has been to teach listener skills prior to teaching speaker skills. In a review of the research literature prior to 2011, Petursdottir and Carr (2011) concluded that research did not support this recommendation. We reviewed the most recent research on the efficiency of…

Many Early Intensive Behavioral Intervention (EIBI) curricula recommend teaching receptive responding before targeting expressive responding (Leaf & McEachin, 1999; Lovaas, 2003). However, a small literature base suggests that teaching expressive responses first may be more efficient when teaching children with ASD and other developmental…

We taught 2 children with visual impairments to select a coin from an array using tactile cues after hearing its name and then to select a coin after hearing its value. Following the acquisition of these listener (receptive language) skills, we then observed the emergence of speaker (expressive language) skills without direct instruction.…

We review recommendations for sequencing instruction in receptive and expressive language objectives in early and intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI) programs. Several books recommend completing receptive protocols before introducing corresponding expressive protocols. However, this recommendation has little empirical support, and some…

The effects of expressive modeling experiences on the observational learning of generative language by children with severe mental retardation was investigated. All six children (aged six-nine) demonstrated observational learning of responses modeled by their peers. Organizing the modeling experiences according to matrix-training principles…

Four nine year olds with mild mental retardation received training on the meaning of idiomatic phrases. All children demonstrated learning and an ability to understand the learned idioms when presented in unfamiliar contexts. Children were able to generalize their receptive learning to an expressive task with varying levels of success. (Author/JDD)

Four nonverbal autistic children (10-15 years old) were taught expressive sign labels for common objects, using a training procedure that consisted of prompting, fading, and stimulus rotation. (Author/BD)

An approach based on Skinner's (1957) theory of verbal behavior has been developed to understand and teach elementary communication skills to children with autism and developmental disabilities (Sundberg & Partington, 1998). However, few studies have directly examined the characteristics of emerging language in children with developmental…

Total communication procedures were used with three severely mentally retarded children (mental ages 2 to 4) to examine the effects of receptive speech on the acquisition and maintenance of manual signing. Signs corresponding to known words were generally acquired faster and retained better than signs corresponding to unknown words. (Author/JW)

Results of a study with four autistic students (ages five-nine) showed that a picture training procedure was effective in teaching a generalized response to questions for which the relevant cue was visible, whereas specific generalization programing was required for situations in which the relevant cue was not visible. (Author/DB)

A time delay procedure was used to teach three children (ages 5-9) with autism to ask the question "What's that?" when novel stimuli were presented, and generalization of the skill was assessed. Results suggest that children with autism can be taught to ask questions that lead to acquisition of new information. (Author/DB)

Parents of three autistic boys (ages 7-8) were taught to use a time delay procedure to increase their children's appropriate spontaneous speech in naturally occurring daily settings. Results indicated that all children increased their daily spontaneous speech and generalized their speech to other locations and persons. (Author/JDD)

This study found that naturalistic conversation training improved the spontaneous speech production of two children (ages three and four) with speech production disabilities. (Author/DB)