Peer-Mediated Conversational Repair in Students with Moderate and Severe Disabilities

Conversation skills are critical to learning and the development of social relationships. Some students with severe disabilities have a difficult time conversing with their nondisabled classmates because of their unintelligible verbalizations or an inability to correct or repair a message that may have been misunderstood by their conversational partner. For intervention purposes, extant literature strongly suggests that typical similar-age peers are effective change agents. In a study using a multiple baseline design with generalization probes, nine typical peers were taught to request repairs in response to unintelligible verbalizations. Three peers were assigned to each of the three target students. Teaching peers to request repair resulted in increased repaired messages and frequency of turns taken during conversation.