Procedures for teaching appropriate gestural communication skills to children with autism

Four children with autism were taught to use gestures in combination with oral communication. Using a multiple-baseline across-reponse catergories containing gestures representatives of attention-directing/getting affective and descriptive behaviour. Although none of the participants displayed appropriate gestural and verbal responses during baseline, all participants accquired this skill with the systematic implementation of modeling, prompting and reinforcement. Generalisation measurers indicated that the children learned to respond in the presence of novel stimuli and a novel setting. Social validity measures revealed that the participants behaviour appeared more socially appropriate at the completion of the study than at the start of the study and that the participants behaviour was indistinguishable from that of their typically developing peers. [AJ].