The effects of peer mediated intervention on the social vocalization skills of adolescents with a developmental disability

Developmental disabilities are often associated with neurological conditions that can be seen in early childhood and affect both verbal and nonverbal communication and the application of language skills. In 1957, B. F. Skinner published Verbal Behavior that described language as a behavior and defined verbal behavior as any behavior mediated by a listener. Behavior is now viewed as communication and when language fails to develop in the typical manner, specific intervention is required to establish verbal skills. To facilitate communication, non-vocal children with a developmental disability often use augmentative and alternative communication or AAC. A type of AAC device is a speech generating device or SGD. SGD's can now be utilized on an iPad or smartphone, making them less expensive and more portable. The study will analyze the effectiveness of peer mediated interventions utilizing technology to facilitate teaching social conversational skills to adolescents with a developmental disability, utilizing the aspects of verbal behavior within applied behavior analysis (ABA). By using a concurrent multiple baseline design across participants, adolescents with a developmental disability will be taught through peer mediated interventions to mand and use intraverbals using a 2-step sequence and respond to the questions, "What do you want?" and "How are you?". Data will be derived on the number of independent mands or vocalizations, independent responses using intraverbals, and the duration of social interactions. Results indicated that peer-mediation interventions did increase social vocalization skills of individuals with a developmental disability within limited measures. Additionally, attending skills were increased while using a virtual learning setting. Results are discussed with respect to educational implications, limitations, and future research for enhancing social vocalization skills for adolescents with developmental disabilities.