The study assessed effects of a transfer of stimulus control procedure on acquisition and cross-setting generalization of manual signs with four profoundly retarded young adults. Results showed that individuals acquired the trained signs and maintenance and generalization across settings and persons occurred but was highly variable between and…

Evaluation of a program which taught six severely mentally retarded individuals (ages 8-25) to sign interactively with each other found participants showed increased signing skills in a training play situation, generalized use of these skills in a second play situation, and maintained the trained skills over a 2 to 4 month period. (Author/DB)

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.…

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)

At the Iowa School for the Deaf, five young hearing children (age three years) were integrated into the preschool program to study the development of total communication skills including speech and language patterns. (Author/PHR)

One member from each of two object pairs was assigned as a reinforcer during a generalized requesting intervention using manual signs or graphic symbols with two severely handicapped learners (age 18). Prior generalized request training and reinforcer use did not influence effectiveness of later instruction in acquisition and generalized use of…

This study of the effects of intensive multisensory speech training on the speech production of a profoundly hearing-impaired child (age nine) found that the addition of Visual Phonics hand cues did not result in speech production gains. All six target phonemes were generalized to new words and maintained after the intervention was discontinued.…

Four adults with moderate/severe disabilities were taught to request objects by using the manual signs "want" or "please" plus an object label sign, within the context of familiar activities in which needed objects were missing. All participants acquired a generic requesting response, and three acquired an explicit requesting…

This study investigated whether a person with profound mental retardation could effectively learn specific requests using two different communication modes, both including the same set of graphic symbols. It also sought to compare whether the participant showed a preference for one modality over the other and to determine whether the participant…

Verbal prompts, modeling, physical guidance, positive reinforcement, fading, and chaining procedures were used to teach two nonverbal individuals (one severely and one moderately mentally retarded) an interactive signing dialogue in a naturalistic setting. Although clients learned to use signed communication, extensive training was required and…