ABSTRACT
From the early 1960s to the middle 1970s, clinical interventions in the communication repertoires of persons with severe intellectual deficiencies were directed by a model that merged behaviorism and descriptive linguistics. This model maintained a historical clinical bias toward speech as the primary mode in which communication was to be sought (McLean, 1983), and it generated systematic modeling and reinforcement procedures to attain phonological, morphological, and syntactic forms in the speech mode (Gray & Ryan, 1973; Guess, Sailor, & Baer, 1974; Kent, 1974; McLean, Yoder, & Schiefelbusch, 1972; Ruder & Smith, 1974; Sloane & MacAulay, 1968; Waryas & Stremel, 1973).
