ABSTRACT
The communicative abilities of adults with mental retardation have long been the subject of considerable investigation. Although early research in the area of their speech and language (Blount, 1968; Schiefelbusch, 1972) focused more on characterizing phonological and grammatical aspects, recently this approach has been replaced by a more “functional” orientation. Functional communication skills are defined as those skills that are “useful to the adult in terms of meeting his/her environmental and communicative demands” (Bedrosian, 1988, p. 266).
