Acquisition of sign language by autistic children. III: Generalized descriptive phrases

Sign language training has emerged as a viable alternative to speech for those autistic children who remain nonverbal in spite of remediation efforts. Yet the variables responsible for the acquisition of specific signing skills have not been fully investigated. The present study was undertaken to validate experimentally a portion of a general language intervention program developed by the authors. Specifically, we focused on descriptive signing that involved action-object phrases. Four autistic children were successfully taught such phrases following an intervention composed of prompting, fading, stimulus rotation, and differential reinforcement. After being trained on a small number of action-object phrases, the children displayed skill generalization to new situations. The results were discussed with respect to the likely need for added incidental teaching to bring about communicative use of the skills taught.