The conditioning of language in a nonverbal child conducted in a special education classroom

The purpose of this study was twofold: first, to assess the feasibility of conducting speech conditioning sessions within a preschool classroom, and second, to examine the process of transfer of learned verbalizations from those sessions to classroom free time. The results indicated that the former was not only feasible but effective. A nonverbal boy, enrolled in a special education preschool, was taught to imitate reliably six words in 46 15-minute sessions. Furthermore, the child's use of spontaneous whole words during the rest of the classroom day seemed to be responsive to the contingencies of the speech sessions.