Choice-making as a natural context forteaching early communication board use to a ten year old boy with no spoken language and severe intellectual disability

Selecting graphic symbols for an initial request lexicon: integrative review

“…A number of authors have suggested that correspondence is crucial in the development of a requesting repertoire (Reichle, Sigafoos, & Piche, 1989;Sigafoos & Kook, 1992;Stephenson & Linfoot, 1995). The term correspondence is generally used to refer to a relationship between "doing and saying" or "saying and doing" (Stokes, Osnes, & Chambers DaVerne, 1993).…”

“…Our review of these requesting studies (see Table 2) revealed that correspondence was tested in only three studies (Kozleski, 1991a;Sigafoos & Kook, 1992;Stephenson & Linfoot, 1995) as opposed to eight studies without correspondence testing and five studies for which correspondence training was not applicable (i.e., the participants were taught generalized requests). Considering that correspondence has been established as a necessary evaluation component for ensuring the acquisition of requesting, studies without this component cannot ensure with certainty that requests were truly under the functional control of a corresponding consequence.…”

“…A possibly limiting factor for the generalizability of this study for the purposes of this article is the use of a labeling response rather than a requesting response. Among the requesting studies (see Table 2), only two included assessment of spoken referent comprehension (Sigafoos, Reichle, Doss, Hall, & Pettitt, 1990;Stephenson & Linfoot, 1995). However, neither study manipulated the degree of iconicity, and thus they bear little relevance to the issue at hand.…”

“…If this hypothesis were verified, it would call for selecting iconic over opaque symbol-referent relations for initial request lexicons. Stephenson and Linfoot (1995) argued that iconicity allows learners to acquire the concept that each symbol represents one object (i.e., referent) and to generalize the concept that a symbol stands for the object/referent it resembles. On the other hand, Sevcik, Romski, and Wilkinson (1991) argued that symbolic (i.e., opaque) representations provide freedom from image-based referents.…”

An evaluation of the preferences of individuals with severe and multiple disabilities and the teaching of choice-making skills

“…A review of the studies on teaching the choicemaking skills (Sigafoos and Dempsey, 1992;Kennedy and Haring, 1993;Stephenson and Linfoot, 1995;Parsons et al, 1997;Koeppel, 1998;Stafford, 1999;Barry and Burlew, 2004;Dutt, 2010;Clark, 2006;Hoch, 2006;Duke, 2008) provides that preferences are assessed before teaching the choice-making behavior. In the light of the research data, one can conclude that preference assessment is necessary for teaching to make choices.…”