An alternating treatments comparison of oral and total communication training with minimally verbal retarded children.
Add signs to your verbal behavior lessons—total communication beat oral-only drills for teaching four-word sentences to minimally verbal children with intellectual disability.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with three minimally verbal children who had intellectual disability.
They used an alternating-treatments design. Each child got two lessons in one day. One lesson used only spoken words. The other lesson used signs plus spoken words.
The goal was to see which method taught four-word sentences faster.
What they found
Total communication won. When kids could both sign and speak, they repeated four-word sentences better than with speech alone.
The advantage showed up for every child in the study.
How this fits with other research
Saunders et al. (1988) later saw the same boost. Their nonverbal preschoolers with autism kept new words longer when sign and speech were taught together.
Garcia (1974) had already proved that spoken-only drills can build sentences, but only after extra steps to make the skill travel to new pictures and people.
Mason et al. (2021) moved the field forward again. They dropped the signs and used fast-paced precision teaching on mands, tacts, echoics, and sequelics. Their large 2021 sample still gained expressive language, showing the field now has more tools than just adding signs.
Why it matters
If you run verbal behavior programs for minimally verbal clients, pair every spoken target with its sign. You can start tomorrow—no new materials needed. After mastery, fade the signs if speech stands alone, or keep both for robust communication.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study was a comparison of the effects of oral speech with total communication (speech plus sign language) training on the ability of mentally retarded children to repeat 4-word sentences. Three children were chosen who used single words to communicate but who did not combine words into complete sentences. Three sentence pairs were trained, with each pair having one sentence trained using oral methods and an equivalent one trained using the total communication approach. Both training procedures involved chaining sentence parts, reinforcement, and prompting. Oral methods involved presenting vocal stimuli and requiring vocal responses whereas total communication methods involved presenting vocal and signed stimuli and requiring vocal and signed responses. For the initial sentence pair with each child, an alternating treatments design was used to determine the relative efficacy of the two language training approaches. This was repeated with a second and third sentence pair using a multiprobe technique within a multiple baseline design. Results pointed to the superiority of the total communication approach in facilitating sentence repetition. Possible explanations of these results are offered and the utility of the alternating treatments experimental design is discussed.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1984 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1984.17-559