Teaching Mands for Social Information to Individuals with Developmental Disabilities

Autism Beyond Early Intensive Behavioral Intervention

“…The paper includes an overview of studies that appear to overestimate functional outcomes for individuals using speech-generating devices and provides recommendations for clinicians to assure efforts to teach functional communication result in effective outcomes. Next, Gordon and Shillingsburg (2019) give special attention to one of the most common skill-acquisition targets that is incorporated in functional communication programming-teaching learners how to request desired items/activities and/or request removal of aversive stimuli in their environment. This skill is also necessary to request information from a social partner in order to sustain a conversation, which is the focus of this study.…”

“…This skill is also necessary to request information from a social partner in order to sustain a conversation, which is the focus of this study. The study by Gordon and Shillingsburg (2019) demonstrates an effective procedure that has been used to teach this skill to younger learners. Experimenters taught participants a series of targets for known and unknown social information and demonstrated acquisition and generalization across all participants with the experimenter and a novel social partner.…”