Conversational Skills Training: Teaching Adolescents With Mental Handicaps To Be Verbally Assertive

The purpose of this study was to train three adolescents with mental handicaps the conversational skills of initiating a topic, and continuing the conversation by cueing an adult listener to speak. A reversal design was used to evaluate the effects of treatment (systematic delay, instruction, prompting, modeling, and reinforcement) on the percentage of functional initiating and cueing behavior during 5-minute conversations between each subject and a nonhandicapped adult. Results indicated increases in both targeted behaviors following 9 weeks of training. Only minimal effects of treatment generalized to conversations between subjects and two nonhandicapped adults from the community.