Modified satiation reducing ruminative vomiting without excessive weight gain.

Satiation procedures involving increased food intake recently have been used to reduce rates of ruminative vomiting in mentally retarded children. Use of these nonaversive intervention procedures has been limited almost exclusively to clients who are seriously underweight since excessive weight gain is a common side effect. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether modified satiation, provided by unlimited quantities of low calorie foods, could decelerate ruminative vomiting to clinically acceptable rates without producing undesirable weight gain. The two subjects were a severely mentally retarded man and a profoundly mentally retarded woman whose histories of ruminative vomiting were extensive but whose body weights were within their ideal ranges. A multiple-baseline-across-subjects combined with a withdrawal design demonstrated significant reductions in both subjects' rates of ruminative vomiting while their body weights remained within the middle of their ideal weight ranges. The results are discussed in terms of their clinical utility and the need for future analyses of the critical components of food satiation techniques.

An alternating treatment comparison of oral and total communications training programs with echolalic autistic children.

An alternating treatment comparison was conducted of the relative effectiveness of oral and total communication training models for teaching expressive labeling skills to three echolalic autistic children. The results of this comparison demonstrated that total communication proved to be the most successful approach with each of the subjects. In addition, the replication of these findings both within and across subjects suggest that total communication may be, in general, the most effective of these two training models for teaching basic vocal language skills to echolalic children. A number of hypotheses are presented that may provide a basis for the demonstrated effect.

An abbreviated overcorrection program to reduce self-stimulatory behaviors.

An economical, abbreviated overcorrection procedure was implemented to reduce several self stimulatory and self abusive behaviors of a severely retarded child. These were monitored, along with a non-targeted behavior, tantrum screams, during treatment sessions, and during non-treatment sessions with the experimenter present or absent. A withdrawal design demonstrated that substantial reductions in essentially all the behaviors were achieved during treatment sessions, with visible though less dramatic reductions occurring at other times. Although long-term follow-up observations showed a recovery of baseline performance, the behaviors again were rapidly brought under control when a modified form of the procedure was re-instituted.

Sensorimotor functioning and prelinguistic communication of severely and profoundly retarded individuals.

The prelinguistic, nonverbal communicative behavior of 40 institutionalized severely and profoundly retarded children and adolescents functioning at various stages of Piaget's sensorimotor period was examined. Five scales of the Uzgiris and Hunt (1975) sensorimotor assessment were used to determine general level of sensorimotor functioning. A standard set of communication elicitation tasks was employed to examine the gestures used to communicate in both imperative and declarative contexts. More competent sensorimotor performance was associated with higher frequency of more sophisticated and symbolic forms of gestural communication, and subjects generally used more complex gestures to communicate in the imperative than in the declarative tasks. Applicability of the results to the design of future language-intervention programs and their implications for general theory concerning the relations between language and cognition and between normal and atypical development were discussed.

A simultaneous treatment comparison of three expressive language training programs with a mute autistic child.

A study was conducted in order to simultaneously compare the relative effectiveness of three different language training models (total communication sign training, nonverbal "sign-alone" training, and oral [vocal] training) for teaching expressive language skills to a 4 1/2-year-old mute autistic child. A single-subject, alternating-treatment (multielement) design with replication within subject was used to compare the rate of expressive word acquisition across training models. Results show the total communication model to be substantially superior to both oral and sign-alone training models, and place in question the theory of an intersensory integration disability to explain the success of sign language. Alternatively, the data suggest that the use of physical prompts combined with multisensory inputs provide a basis for the demonstrated success.