Acquisition of sign language by autistic children. I: Expressive labelling.

There has been growing interest in teaching sign language to autistic children who have failed to develop speech. However, controlled experimentation in this area is nonexistent. In the present study, four nonverbal autistic children were taught expressive sign labels for common objects, using a training procedure that consisted of prompting, fading, and stimulus rotation. The efficacy of the procedure was demonstrated in a multiple-baseline design across objects. The results were reliable, replicable across children, and generalizable across therapists. A stimulus control analysis demonstrated that, for three of the children, correct signing was controlled solely by the visual cues associated with the presentation of a given object and was independent of respect to the known perceptual and linguistic deficits of autistic children.