Acquisition of Sign Language by Autistic Children Ii: Spontaneity and Generalization Effects

Abstract

Autistic children typically do not use their language repertoire in order to communicate.Six autistic children who exhibited poor communication skills were trained to use their sign repertoire to make spontaneous requests of adults. Training consisted of imitative prompting, fading, and differential reinforcement, and included aspects of incidental teaching. The children displayed an increase in the rate and variety of spontaneous sign requests (Experiment 1). Generalization of spontaneity across adults (Experiments 1 and 2) and settings (Experiment 2) was also observed. We suggest that spontaneity may be facilitated when language is brought under the control of broadly defined stimuli such as adult attention rather than narrowly defined stimuli such as the presence of specific objects or verbal prompting in the form of questions. Finally, response generalization was observed as well (Experiment 1). Specifically, as spontaneity increased, selfstimulatory behavior decreased. This result may be accounted for in terms of reinforcer competition, reinforcer consistency, or discriminative stimulus effects.

Developing a Technology for the Use of Operant Extinction in Clinical Settings: An Examination of Basic and Applied Research

“…For example, withholding reinforcement for appropriate be-havior that occurs at a low amplitude (e.g., speech loudness) could induce instances of higher amplitude behavior, which then could be maintained through reinforcement. Several studies have examined the use of extinction to increase behavioral variability (e.g., Carr & Kologinsky, 1983;Duker & van Lent, 1991;Lalli, Zanolli, & Wohn, 1994). For example, Duker and van Lent increased the number of different gesture requests exhibited by 6 individuals with developmental disabilities by withholding reinforcement for high-rate requests.…”

Teaching Social Language to Moderately Handicapped Students

“…One current approach to teaching language, pragmatics (Bates, 1976), minimizes the importance of training syntactic forms and emphasizes the training of communication skills that have functional effects on other people (Sailor et al, 1980). Under this approach, conversational skills such as greetings, expressing gratitude, turn-taking, topic maintenance, question asking, responding to questions, requesting objects or attention, and commenting on features of the setting or an event have been targeted for intervention (e.g., Carr & Kologinsky, 1983;Lancioni, 1982;Leifer & Lewis, 1984;Peck, Tomlinson, Schuler, Theimer, & Haring, 1984;Reichle, Rogers & Barrett, 1984;Warren, Baxter, Anderson, Marshall, & Baer, 1981).…”

Improving the Cognitive Skills of Hearing Children by Short-Term Intensive Sign Language Training

“…Gardner & Gardner (1969) began training an infant female chimpanzee, named Washoe, to use ASL (American Sign Language) as linguistic communication tool. Some researchers teach sign languages to autistic children who have failed to develop speech and who exhibited poor communication skills and found that sign languages are useful training way for them (Fulwiler & Fouts, 1976;Carr, Binkoff, Kologinsky, & Eddy, 1978;Carr & Kologinsky, 1983). Acredolo & Goodwyn (1985) taught normal infant symbolic gestures and found that despite the heavy use of symbolic gestures, vocal development was advanced.…”