Teaching social language to moderately handicapped students

Snack Talk: Effects of a Naturalistic Visual Communication Support on Increasing Conversation Engagement for Adults with Disabilities

Adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities frequently experience poor life outcomes, with individuals reporting lower levels of social support, relationships, gainful employment, and satisfaction in their quality of life. To ameliorate these outcomes, social skills and social communication interventions aligned with the needs of adults are warranted. This study examined the efficacy of Snack Talk, a supplemental naturalistic visual communication support, with five adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Snack Talk was implemented during the midday mealtime, with the goal of increasing conversation engagement. A withdrawal design across participants was used. Results demonstrated increases in conversation engagement and showed meaningful gains for participants in the intervention and postintervention phase compared to baseline.

A Meta-Analysis of Single-Case Research on Applied Behavior Analytic Interventions for People With Down Syndrome

This systematic review evaluates single-case research design studies investigating applied behavior analytic (ABA) interventions for people with Down syndrome (DS). One hundred twenty-five studies examining the efficacy of ABA interventions on increasing skills and/or decreasing challenging behaviors met inclusion criteria. The What Works Clearinghouse standards and Risk of Bias in N-of-1 Trials scale were used to analyze methodological characteristics, and Tau-U effect sizes were calculated. Results suggest the use of ABA-based interventions are promising for behavior change in people with DS. Thirty-six high-quality studies were identified and demonstrated a medium overall effect. A range of outcomes was targeted, primarily involving communication and challenging behavior. These outcomes will guide future research on ABA interventions and DS.

Connections: Facilitating Social Supports for Students with Deaf-Blindness in General Education Classrooms

This article describes a three-component package to facilitate social supports for students who were deaf-blind in general education classes and discusses the rationale for and importance of its use. It also presents case examples of the application of social support strategies to four students with deaf-blindness who were served in general education or deaf education classes.

How Teaching Perspective Taking to Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders Affects Social Skills: Findings from Research and Suggestions for Practitioners

Behavior-analytic practitioners working with individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) may be approached to incorporate perspective taking into a client's programming. Teaching perspective taking to individuals with ASDs has received attention in both the developmental psychology and, more recently, the behavior-analytic literature. The results of our review of the current evidence suggest that although perspective-taking repertoires believed to be related to social skills can be taught (false belief task performance, deictic frames), only directly teaching the social skills of interest (or applied perspective-taking skills) results in improvements in socially important behavior. The aim of this article is to provide practitioners with the current state of research on how teaching perspective taking affects social skills and to provide suggestions on how these findings might be incorporated into their practice.

Communication intervention for individuals with Down syndrome: Systematic review and meta-analysis

OBJECTIVE

A systematic review was conducted to identify effective intervention strategies for communication in individuals with Down syndrome.

METHODS

We updated and extended previous reviews by examining: (1) participant characteristics; (2) study characteristics; (3) characteristics of effective interventions (e.g., strategies and intensity); (4) whether interventions are tailored to the Down syndrome behavior phenotype; and (5) the effectiveness (i.e., percentage nonoverlapping data and Cohen's d) of interventions.

RESULTS

Thirty-seven studies met inclusion criteria. The majority of studies used behavior analytic strategies and produced moderate gains in communication targets. Few interventions were tailored to the needs of the Down syndrome behavior phenotype.

CONCLUSION

The results suggest that behavior analytic strategies are a promising approach, and future research should focus on replicating the effects of these interventions with greater methodological rigor.

Social Contacts of Adults with Severe Disabilities Living in the Community: A Descriptive Analysis of Relationship Patterns

Social integration and social support are critical elements in determining a person's quality of life. To date, however, very little descriptive information is available on patterns of social contact between persons with severe disabilities and typical members of local communities. This report presents information on the social interaction patterns of 23 adults with severe disabilities across a 2 1/2-year time period. The staff in small, community-based residential programs collected continuous counts of the activities performed by residents and the people (companions) with whom activities were performed. Only those contacts that occurred with people other than people paid to provide support or other residents in the program were counted. The results indicate great variability in the social contact patterns across the 23 people observed, but that on the average they had contact with 63.5 different companions across the 30 months of observation. Social contacts occurred on the average of once every 2 days, and the durability of social contacts indicated that companions seldom continued the relationship beyond a 12-month period, except for family members or someone perceived as a “best friend.” Examination of the final year of observation indicates that the 23 people met about 17 new individuals across the 12-month period. The report offers implications of these results for further research on social contacts and the development of support strategies for building and maintaining social relationships.

Units of Analysis of Social Interaction Outcomes in Supported Education

In spite of increased advocacy efforts, demonstrations, and consumer demand for supported education, there is a paucity of empirical research that investigates the predicted outcomes of this model. The rationale for supported education is based largely on increasing social participation, acceptance, and friendships between students with severe disabilities and nondisabled students. This article discusses several issues that underlie the development of measurement systems to evaluate the social effects of supported education. We believe that it is essential to measure the outcomes of supported education (i.e., increased acceptance, social participation, and levels of friendships) as well as the process variables (e.g., specific social interaction skills) that are pivotal in creating the outcomes. An assessment model for outcome and process variables is described. Within this model, social interaction skills, organizational support characteristics, and contextual features are viewed as pivotal events in attaining valued outcomes.

Promoting Social Interaction through Teaching Generalized Play Initiation Responses to Preschool Children with Autism

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of play initiation training on subsequent social interactions between students with severe disabilities and their nonhandicapped peers within play contexts. In both studies, five nonhandicapped peers were used as training confederates, and generalization probes were conducted within unstructured free-play situations with a larger number of peers who did not participate in training. In Experiment 1, a preschool student with autistic behaviors was integrated into a regular preschool The effects of two treatment conditions were compared: (a) providing an awareness activity plus rewards for the nonhandicapped peers who initiated interactions and (b) teaching initiations and play behaviors to the student with severe disabilities. The results indicated that although the awareness activity plus reward condition increased the frequency of peer initiations, peer responsivity to the initiations by the student with severe disabilities remained low. When the student with severe disabilities was taught to initiate interactions and play appropriately, the level of initiation by the student increased and the level of responsivity by the peers toward his initiations also increased. In Experiment 2, we replicated this effect with two students who were integrated into a kindergarten class. The effects of competent social interaction skills on shaping environments that are responsive to the social initiations of students with severe disabilities are discussed.

Acquisition of Conversation Skills and the Reduction of Inappropriate Social Interaction Behaviors

Three students with severe disabilities were taught to independently initiate a conversation and participate in conversation turntaking throughout a 10-min session across a variety of school and community settings with at least four nondisabled peers as partners. Inappropriate social interaction behaviors that were present at high rates during baseline sessions were observed to decrease as conversation skills were acquired. This finding is discussed in terms of the hypothesis that inappropriate behaviors can serve a variety of communicative functions and may be reduced as functionally equivalent, socially acceptable communication means are acquired.

Generalized Effects of Conversation Skill Training

Three high school students with severe disabilities were taught to initiate and maintain a conversation independently through a 4-min session with a communication book adaptation. Instruction occurred across a variety of school settings with several regular education students serving as communication partners. For each of the three students, an analysis of the generalized effect of conversation training revealed that conversation initiation and “turntaking” skills generalized to “conversation opportunities” in settings and with partners not included in instructional sessions. Additionally, increases in conversation skills and component behaviors (greeting and commenting) were accompanied by decreases in inappropriate social interaction behaviors.

Creating Socially Supportive Environments for Fully Included Students who Experience Multiple Disabilities

This investigation analyzed the effectiveness of an intervention designed to facilitate the social inclusion of three students who experienced significant physical and intellectual challenges and, for two students, dual sensory impairments. The children were full-time members of two first-grade and one fourth-grade classrooms. The individualized intervention package included three major components: (a) provision of ongoing information to classmates about the communication system, adaptive equipment, and educational activities of the students with disabilities in the context of naturally occurring interactions between the students and their classmates or during “club” meetings; (b) identification and utilization of various media that could serve as the basis for interactive exchanges between the focus students and others; and (c) ongoing facilitation by educational staff of social exchanges between students and their classmates through the establishment of a “buddy” system, arrangement of interactive activities across the day, and prompting and interpreting communicative exchanges when necessary. All aspects of intervention were implemented by educational staff including general education and inclusion support teachers, paraprofessionals, and related service personnel. An analysis of the interactive patterns between the focus students and others indicated that when the intervention was fully implemented, there were increases in (a) reciprocal interactions with peers, (b) focus student-initiated interactions, and (c) focus student-initiated interactions that were comments (with no increase in requests or protests). In addition, there were decreases in assistive interactions with paraprofessionals. The social validity of changes in interactive patterns between the focus students and their classmates was established through interviews with the students' friends and their teachers.

Quantified trends in the history of verbal behavior research

The history of scientific research about verbal behavior research, especially that based on Verbal Behavior (Skinner, 1957), can be assessed on the basis of a frequency and celeration analysis of the published and presented literature. In order to discover these quantified trends, a comprehensive bibliographical database was developed. Based on several literature searches, the bibliographic database included papers pertaining to verbal behavior that were published in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, Behaviorism, The Behavior Analyst, and The Analysis of Verbal Behavior. A nonbehavioral journal, the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior was assessed as a nonexample comparison. The bibliographic database also included a listing of verbal behavior papers presented at the meetings of the Association for Behavior Analysis. Papers were added to the database if they (a) were about verbal behavior, (b) referenced B.F. Skinner's (1957) book Verbal Behavior, or (c) did both. Because the references indicated the year of publication or presentation, a count per year of them was measured. These yearly frequencies were plotted on Standard Celeration Charts. Once plotted, various celeration trends in the literature became visible, not the least of which was the greater quantity of verbal behavior research than is generally acknowledged. The data clearly show an acceleration of research across the past decade. The data also question the notion that a "paucity" of research based on Verbal Behavior currently exists. Explanations of the acceleration of verbal behavior research are suggested, and plausible reasons are offered as to why a relative lack of verbal behavior research extended through the mid 1960s to the latter 1970s.

The effects of multiple-exemplar self-instructional training on high school students' generalized conversational interactions

A multiple-baseline-across-students design was used to investigate the effects of multiple-exemplar self-instructional training on the acquisition and generalization of conversational interaction of 4 high school students with mental retardation. The multiple-exemplar component of the model consisted of (a) several peers without disabilities teaching the use of a self-instructional social skills strategy across diverse examples of conversational interactions and across two settings and (b) assessing the generalized effects of training across additional peers and one setting. Findings indicated that peers were effective in teaching the multiple-exemplar strategy and that peer training was associated with systematic increases in generalized conversational interactions with familiar and unfamiliar peers with and without disabilities in an additional setting. Social validation data indicated that following multiple-exemplar training, all participants' performances approximated those of general education students and was judged by others to have improved.

Using video modeling to teach reciprocal pretend play to children with autism

The purpose of the present study was to use video modeling to teach children with autism to engage in reciprocal pretend play with typically developing peers. Scripted play scenarios involving various verbalizations and play actions with adults as models were videotaped. Two children with autism were each paired with a typically developing child, and a multiple-probe design across three play sets was used to evaluate the effects of the video modeling procedure. Results indicated that both children with autism and the typically developing peers acquired the sequences of scripted verbalizations and play actions quickly and maintained this performance during follow-up probes. In addition, probes indicated an increase in the mean number of unscripted verbalizations as well as reciprocal verbal interactions and cooperative play. These findings are discussed as they relate to the development of reciprocal pretend-play repertoires in young children with autism.

Early Intervention Practices and Communication Intervention Strategies for Young Males With Fragile X Syndrome

Purpose: This study describes speech-language pathologists’ impressions of the communication difficulties of young males with fragile X syndrome (FXS) and the need for both syndrome-specific and individualized interventions. The findings of a regional study that identified speech-language pathologists’ impressions of the speech, language, and behavioral difficulties experienced by males with FXS and an array of interventions used by speech-language pathologists to improve communication skills for these children are reported.

Methods: Fifty-one speech-language pathologists providing intervention for males with FXS ranging in age from 2 to 9 years (mean age=6;3 [years;months]) were interviewed.

Results: The majority of the speech-language pathologists reported that boys with FXS exhibit a visually based, experiential or wholistic learning preference. They emphasized the necessity of making environmental accommodations for limited attention span, difficulties with topic and activity transitions, sensory deficits, and low threshold for anxiety. They reported that speech goals focused on slowing rate and increasing precision for verbal children and both low and high levels of assistive technology for nonverbal or minimally verbal children. Language goals focused on listening, auditory comprehension, and narrative/conversation skills. Pragmatic goals emphasized social dialogue, role playing, and topic maintenance.

Clinical Implications: This study suggests that young males with FXS present the clinician with a constellation of behaviors and communication impairments that are both syndrome specific and symptom familiar. The specific communication strengths and deficits described by clinicians working with these children are common to many children with speech and language impairments compounded by cognitive deficits. Intervention programs for young boys with FXS should also attend closely to the specific behavioral (e.g., increased anxiety, attention deficits) and sensory "overload" problems they often exhibit before designing a tailored intervention program.

A supported relationships intervention to increase the social integration of persons with traumatic brain injuries

A supported relationships intervention was used to increase the integrated social contacts (ISCs) of 3 persons with traumatic brain injury (TBI) who were each matched with 4 community participants. The intervention consisted of asking participants to meet with their matched counterpart to engage in leisure activities once per week for 4 weeks. Additionally, community participants were provided with a brief training session on TBI, were given specific suggestions on interacting with the persons with TBI with whom they were matched, and received weekly phone calls from the researcher. Frequency of ISCs were analyzed with a multiple baseline design across participants. All 3 participants with TBI increased the frequency of ISCs after implementation of the supported relationships intervention and continued to experience more than baseline levels of ISCs during 8 weeks of follow-up. These data suggest that social integration can be enhanced with a procedure requiring limited staff intervention.

Academic effects of providing peer support in general education classrooms on students without disabilities

We studied the academic effects on peers without disabilities of serving as peer supports for students with disabilities in general education classrooms. Three peers were studied using a range of indicators, including academic engagement, coursework performance, and social validity assessments. Peers assisting a student with disabilities via curricular adaptation, assignment completion, and social facilitation constituted the multicomponent independent variable. We used withdrawal or multiple baseline designs to demonstrate positive benefits for peers for all measures used. In addition, follow-up data for 2 peers indicated that the positive changes associated with serving as a peer support were maintained for up to 2 months. Our results are discussed in relation to the possible academic and social effects of providing peer supports in general education classrooms for students with and without disabilities.

Social validation of component behaviors of following instructions, accepting criticism, and negotiating

This study evaluated whether behaviors often taught as part of social skills training are judged favorably by others. Community judges evaluated the performances of people in various situations requiring one of three social skills: following instructions, accepting criticism, and negotiating to resolve conflicts. These skills were displayed in videotaped scenes by actors with and without mental retardation who acted out roles that had different types of authority relationships, and when different components or clusters of behavior (nonverbal, specific verbal, or general verbal behaviors) were performed well or poorly. The highest ratings by judges were of videotaped scenes that depicted correct use of all behaviors, regardless of which skill was being examined, whether or not the actor had mental retardation, or what the relationship was between the two actors. The lowest ratings were of videotaped scenes that depicted poor performance of all behaviors, and intermediate ratings were obtained when only some of the behaviors were performed poorly. These results, as well as the verbal responses of judges to questions, indicated that the different behaviors commonly used in teaching the skills of following instructions, accepting criticism, and negotiating are relevant to judgment of social performance, and are likely to be reinforced and maintained by social contingencies.

A peer-mediated social network intervention to enhance the social integration of persons with moderate and severe disabilities

Increasingly, parents, teachers, and students with disabilities are advocating for interventions that go beyond skill training to provide support for participation in integrated environments and support for friendships. The present research demonstrated a social network intervention for youths with moderate and severe disabilities. Two groups of nondisabled peers were recruited to participate in weekly discussions with an adult integration facilitator to increase opportunities for social interaction for 2 students (1 with autism and 1 who was moderately mentally retarded). The groups met to discuss social interactions that had occurred with the students with disabilities and to talk about strategies to promote greater inclusion of the students into ongoing social interaction. The nondisabled students participated in the design and implementation of social skills interventions during transition times and lunch. The nondisabled students used self-monitoring data sheets to record the quantity and quality of interactions. The frequency of interaction, number of opportunities for interaction, and appropriateness of social interactions were analyzed with a multiple baseline design. Results indicated that the social network intervention was successful in increasing the quantity and quality of interactions and that the network strategy promoted the development of friendships. The results are discussed in terms of the need for additional research showing the relationships between increases in social competence, peer-mediated intervention, and the development and support of friendship.

Linking descriptive and experimental analyses in the treatment of bizarre speech

Descriptive and experimental methods were used to analyze the environmental determinants of an adult's bizarre speech. A descriptive analysis of behavior under natural conditions indicated that bizarre vocalizations occurred most often in the presence of task-related demands and in the absence of adult attention. Further, bizarre speech occurring during tasks was followed frequently by the cessation of task demands by staff or the subject's voluntary disengagement from task-related activities; bizarre speech observed during noninteractional periods (i.e., in the absence of adult attention) was frequently followed by staff attention. The escape and attention hypotheses were tested under analogue conditions. Results of the experimental analysis supported only the attention hypothesis; that is, bizarre speech appeared to function as an attention-producing behavior. The functional analysis data were used to select two different yet functionally equivalent treatments. The first treatment provided the subject with noncontingent scheduled attention. The second intervention taught the subject social language skills in the form of initiation and expansion statements. Both interventions were effective in suppressing maladapted speech. Advantages of linking descriptive and experimental analyses are discussed.

Re-establishing conversational skills in overtly psychotic, chronic schizophrenic patients. Discrete trials training on the psychiatric ward

A discrete trials procedure incorporating graduated prompts, social and consumable reinforcement, corrective feedback, delay of reinforcement, and a chaining procedure was used to teach four actively psychotic, chronic schizophrenic patients rudimentary conversational skills. In a multiple-baseline design, training was sequentially applied to the target conversational skills of giving a salutation, addressing the trainer by his or her name, making a personal inquiry, and asking a conversational question. Results showed systematic training effects in three of the four subjects. Training gains were reliable but slow, requiring over 70 trials to reach acquisition criterion on certain skills. The fourth subject exhibited only unstable gains on the first target response and minor improvements on the second target response, the latter of which disappeared when training procedures were withdrawn. All subjects displayed spontaneous recovery on the generalization measure of answering a personal inquiry.

Teaching autistic children conversational speech using video modeling

We assessed the effects of video modeling on acquisition and generalization of conversational skills among autistic children. Three autistic boys observed videotaped conversations consisting of two people discussing specific toys. When criterion for learning was met, generalization of conversational skills was assessed with untrained topics of conversation; new stimuli (toys); unfamiliar persons, siblings, and autistic peers; and other settings. The results indicated that the children learned through video modeling, generalized their conversational skills, and maintained conversational speech over a 15-month period. Video modeling shows much promise as a rapid and effective procedure for teaching complex verbal skills such as conversational speech.

A problem-solving approach to social skills training in employment settings with mentally retarded youth

The present study examined two approaches to teaching social behaviors to 3 developmentally disabled youths in work contexts. In one approach, a problem-solving procedure was learned and transferred to different materials. Conversational probes monitored interactions between disabled employees and their co-workers and customers. A multiple baseline design demonstrated that the training produced generalization and maintenance of the targeted social behaviors to the work settings: A second approach based on a role-playing intervention produced no substantial generalization in the work setting. A social validation questionnaire administered to co-workers supported the efficacy of the problem-solving training procedure. The efficacy of social problem-solving training was discussed in terms of sufficient exemplars, common stimuli, and self-mediations.