Acquisition of sign language by autistic children. II: Spontaneity and generalization effects.
Prompt, fade, and reward turns static signs into spontaneous requests that travel across people and places.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Six autistic children learned to ask for things with sign language. The team used imitation prompts, fading, and rewards. They also used incidental teaching. That means they waited for the child to show interest, then asked for a sign.
The study ran a multiple baseline across kids. Each child started training at a different time. The goal was spontaneous requests that work with new adults and in new rooms.
What they found
All six kids began to ask for items on their own. Their signs spread to new people and places. Self-stimming dropped while signing rose.
How this fits with other research
Skrtic et al. (1982) tried a similar plan one year earlier. They also wove signing into daily routines. Both studies show the same lift in real-world use.
Carr et al. (1985) swapped signs for prepositions. Again, incidental teaching beat drills for general use. The pattern holds across language targets.
Shield et al. (2016) seems to disagree. Native-signing autistic kids still lag behind deaf peers. The key gap is exposure versus training. The 1983 kids got careful ABA teaching, not just sign around them.
Why it matters
You can turn non-verbal rote signs into real requests. Wait for interest, prompt once, then reward the sign. Do this across rooms and adults to lock the skill in place.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →During snack, wait for eye contact, then prompt the sign for 'cracker' and deliver the item right away.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autistic children typically do not use their language repertoire in order to communicate. Six autistic children who exhibited poor communication skills were trained to use their sign repertoire to make spontaneous requests of adults. Training consisted of imitative prompting, fading, and differential reinforcement, and included aspects of incidental teaching. The children displayed an increase in the rate and variety of spontaneous sign requests (Experiment 1). Generalization of spontaneity across adults (Experiments 1 and 2) and settings (Experiment 2) was also observed. We suggest that spontaneity may be facilitated when language is brought under the control of broadly defined stimuli such as adult attention rather than narrowly defined stimuli such as the presence of specific objects or verbal prompting in the form of questions. Finally, response generalization was observed as well (Experiment 1). Specifically, as spontaneity increased, self-stimulatory behavior decreased. This result may be accounted for in terms of reinforcer competition, reinforcer consistency, or discriminative stimulus effects.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1983 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1983.16-297