The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of manual sign mand training combined with prompt delay and vocal prompting on the production of vocal responses in nonvocal children with developmental disabilities. A multiple baseline design across participants verified the effectiveness of this intervention. All participants showed increases in vocal responses following the implementatio...

Overview: Transition from school to adulthood is not always easy for youth. For individuals with a disability, such as intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), the challenges in transition become exacerbated. In this symposium, we discuss four studies which aim to identify challenges in the transition process from both macroand micro-system perspectives, determine who involved and mos...

Detailed data on private providers of long-term residential services for persons with developmental disabilities permit investigation of the causes and consequences of frontline worker turnover for the same establishments. The endogeneity of turnover with compensation and consequence variables is accounted for in the estimation. Turnover is determined by client characteristics, frontline-worker...

Family systems theory posits that the relative effectiveness of early interventions will vary depending on various aspects of the family. This study tested whether maternal responsivity would predict the extent to which Prelinguistic Milieu Teaching (PMT) facilitated generalized intentional communication better than a contrast treatment that was conducted in a small group by a responsive adult ...

The purpose of this study was to determine whether manual sign or the Picture Exchange Communication System (P.E.C.S.) (Frost and Bondy, 1994) would be more effective in teaching mand skills to adults with mental retardation in the severe and profound range. Four participants were taught to mand for four reinforcing items using both communication modalities, in an alternating treatments design....

Five individuals with autism or other developmental disabilities participated in paired-stimulus preference assessments during repeated baseline probes. All subjects initially showed a pronounced bias by typically selecting the stimulus placed in either the left or right position. Biased responding for 3 subjects was eliminated when training trials were conducted in which a stimulus of known le...

The purpose of the current study was to explore the use of overt and covert self-rules in the acquisition, maintenance, and generalization of a chained task by adults with mild developmental disabilities. This research differed from previous research in that the experimenter did not deliver reinforcement for correct responses during training, and we examined the correspondence between each self...