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ACQUISITION OF EXPRESSIVE SIGNING BY AUTISTIC CHILDREN: AN EVALUATION OF THE RELATIVE EFFECTS OF SIMULTANEOUS COMMUNICATION AND SIGN‐ALONE TRAINING
Author(s) -
Remington Bob,
Clarke Sue
Publication year - 1983
Publication title -
journal of applied behavior analysis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.1
H-Index - 76
eISSN - 1938-3703
pISSN - 0021-8855
DOI - 10.1901/jaba.1983.16-315
Subject(s) - psychology , nonverbal communication , imitation , stimulus control , stimulus (psychology) , reinforcement , autism , multiple baseline design , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology , social psychology , neuroscience , psychiatry , nicotine , intervention (counseling)
Two methods of training autistic children to use manual signs were compared. Two children, one mute and one capable of some verbal imitation, were taught to use signs as expressive labels for pictures of objects. Using an alternating treatments design, speed of sign acquisition was compared across two training conditions in which signs were presented either accompanied by, or without, the corresponding verbal label. In both conditions, the training procedure incorporated reinforcement, modeling, prompting, fading, and stimulus rotation. The efficacy of training in both treatment conditions was demonstrated by the use of a multiple baseline control across signs, but no clear differences in acquisition speed across conditions were apparent. Posttests conducted to assess stimulus control of signing, and learning of verbal labels when these were present in training, showed that the behavior of the imitative, but not the mute, child was controlled by the verbal stimuli. The implications of the results both for understanding deficits characteristic of autistic children and for developing appropriate language training procedures are discussed.