Education and Training in Autism and Developmental Disabilities

eaches for the item, the researcher purposefully
might ignore, ask a question (what do
you want), or give an incorrect response (e.g.,
food instead of the toy requested by child) to
create communication breakdown. In naturalistic
approach, on the other hand, the researcher
observes interactions of student with
a social partner during natural routines (e.g.,
child and mother interaction during free
play). Then, s/he evaluates how frequently
breakdowns occur, how frequently student attempts
to repair, and how often these repair
attempts are understood by social partners.
Each approach has both advantages and
disadvantages. An advantage of structured approach
is that all of the participants receive
equal number of opportunities to respond to
a communication breakdown; therefore, it is
feasible to compare repair strategies across
students. Another advantage is that the approach
is time efficient because it is possible
to sample a great number of behaviors in a
very short time. However, we cannot assess
frequency of communication breakdowns using
this approach. In such case, naturalistic
approach would be more appropriate. Another
advantage to naturalistic approach may
be that student might be able to understand
the communicative intent of social partners
more easily (e.g. mother and teachers) than
they do that of an unfamiliar partner. Similarly,
it might be more difficult for social partners
to interpret and respond to student’s
communication behaviors. Therefore, students
are more likely to persist in their communication
attempts with familiar partners
(Halle et al., 2004).
To date, only one study included communication
breakdown of students who are nonverbal
in natural environment. Keen (2005) examined
the communication repair strategies
of six non verbal young students with autism.
Results of this study showed that participants
attempted to repair breakdowns in communication
with their mothers using repetitions,
augmentations and substitutions. However,
authors analyzed the breakdown repair strategies
displayed by only six students with autism
who were nonverbal during mother child interaction.
This study should be replicated and
extended to larger number of student as well
as other contexts. It is also critical to extend
the study to another culture and to a language
other than English. The purpose of this study
was to analyze communication repair strategies
produced by twenty-six nonverbal students
with developmental disabilities while interacting
with their teachers during free play.
The following questions were addressed:
1. How frequently did students initiate communication,
what percentage of initiation
resulted in communication breakdown,
and what percentage of breakdowns was
repaired by the students?
2. What types of repair strategies were produced
by the students during interactions
with their teachers?
3. Did repair strategies used by students vary
according to the type of breakdowns produced
by teachers?
Method
Participants
Teacher participants. All teacher participants
were female. Four of the five teachers
who participated in this study had Bachelor’s
degrees, and one had a master’s degree in
special education. Their teaching experiences
ranged from two to 12 years. Participants were
selected based on two criteria: (a) had non
verbal students with disabilities in their classrooms,
(b) willing to participate into this
study.
Student participants. Participants of the
study were twenty-six students with development
disabilities. There were 19 boys and 7
girls with a mean age of 6.23 (ranging from 4
to 11). They were recruited in two different
units serving students with developmental disabilities
located in a university in Turkey (Institute
of Research for the Handicapped; and
Education, Training, and Research Center for
Speech and Language Disorders). Table 1 illustrates
student demographic information.
As can be seen in Table 1, students’ diagnoses
included mental retardation, Down syndrome,
and autism/mental retardation. In
Turkey, because there are no reliable and
valid standardized tools available to diagnose
students with disabilities and evaluate their
cognitive and language abilities, these students
typically were evaluated based on informal
evaluations by varying professionals (e.g.,
Communication Breakdown / 401