Parents Teaching Location Prepositions to their Intellectually Handicapped Children

Using prompting and reinforcement procedures, two intellectually handicapped children in a parent oriented language teaching programme were taught to respond correctly to categories of locational prepositional requests. Training sessions for parents and daily parent teaching sessions for the children alternated with weekly probe sessions. During home teaching a child was taught to respond to one request and then, during probing, the child was tested for generalization of this teaching to untrained requests. Responses to probed requests were never prompted. The results show that, as requests from one category were taught, so the children’s responses to the untrained requests became increasingly correct. One child was able to satisfactorily discriminate among two and then three different categories of prepositional requests. The other child did not reach this stage, largely because his mother felt that the discrimination tasks were too difficult. However, there was evidence in training that this child could cope with more difficult tasks, and the success of the other child does appear to indicate that the teaching method employed was successful in teaching generalized receptive discrimination among locational prepositional categories.