The UCLA reading and writing program: an evaluation of the beginning stages.

Some individuals with developmental disabilities fail to acquire functional speech despite extensive teaching efforts. To help such individuals develop functional communication skills, a "reading and writing" program was developed. This study was designed to evaluate early parts of the program. Acquisition, transfer, and maintenance of "reading and writing" skills was examined and compared with the acquisition, transfer, and maintenance of sign language. Participants were four children with autism, who scored within the mentally retarded range on standardized tests of intellectual, adaptive, and language functioning, and three 3-year-old non-disabled children. A simultaneous-treatment design was employed to compare the rate of acquisition of "reading and writing" skills to the rate at which the participants acquired receptive and expressive signs. For the participants with autism, acquisition of "reading and writing" was more successful than receptive and expressive signing on all variables assessed. All non-disabled participants acquired all of the "reading and writing" and sign language skills, but participants with autism did not. However, "reading" was acquired slightly quicker by the participants with autism than the non-disabled participants, and the participants with autism also showed some evidence of better transfer and maintenance than the non-disabled participants did.