Developing generalized instruction-following behavior in severely retarded people.

Abstract

A sequence of studies used a transfer of stimulus control procedure to train severely and profoundly retarded people to follow verb-noun instructions and to perform correctly when given only a verbal label for an action or object. Procedures were developed and utilized for providing the subjects with strategies for successfully generalizing to untrained instructions. When training was initiated on more complex instructions involving color or size adjectives, all subjects had some difficulty in acquiring the conditional discriminations. Modifications in the training procedures resulted in most of the subjects learning to respond correctly. Many of the variables deemed critical in training instruction-following skills with such a population are discussed in detail based on the data presented. The implications for training expressive skills in such a population are also discussed.