Establishing a Receptive Repertoire of Communicative Gestures with Individuals who are Profoundly Mentally Retarded

Abstract

A receptive gestural repertoire is mandatory to have nonverbal students with profound mental retardation communicate in a dialogue format. This study addresses two questions: (a) what is the effect of an instructional procedure of progressive time delay on the acquisition of a receptive repertoire of gestures and (b) is there a differential training effect of gestures that are already in student's expressive repertoire (i.e., known gestures) versus gestures that are not in student's expressive repertoire (i.e., unknown gestures). Results with five participants suggest that progressive time delay is effective to establish a receptive repertoire of communicative gestures, whereas no differential training effect of known versus unknown gestures was evinced.

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