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ABSTRACTPeople with profound mental handicaps have in the past been described as behaviourally incompetent or even "vegetative" (Fuller, 1949). Descriptions of this kind convey a belief that such people are incapable of learning or responding to environmental change. Over the last 30 years, however, this view has been challenged and rejected. In both laboratory and applied settings, people with profound mental handicaps have been shown capable of behavioural adaptation and learning. This article first provides an overview of the literature and then examines more recent theoretical work on learning and performance in conditioning situations and the relevance of this work in the treatment and remediation of profound mental handicap.

The authors argue that the Probation Service could benefit greatly by adopting behaviour modification as a basic working method. They believe that its underlying psychological assumptions are more tenable than those of methods currently espoused by the Service, and that, in practice, the approach has already proved successful in tackling many problems commonly encountered in probation case work. They report that where behavioural programmes have been implemented within the Probation Service, the results have been both stimulating and highly encouraging.

AbstractThe terms used to denote the concepts of mental handicap and challenging behaviour are a matter of continuing controversy. In the first part of this paper, research concerned with evaluating the impact of such labels is reviewed, and the value of a semantic technique for assessing the connotative effect of labels is proposed. In the second part, this approach was evaluated in a study in which undergraduate social science and science students completed rating scales for terms currently in use to describe mental handicap and challenging behaviour. There were marked differences in the connotations of terms with very similar denotations. Specifically, recently coined terms (e.g. 'learning difficulty', 'challenging behaviour') were rated more favourably than more familiar descriptions (e.g. 'mental retardation', 'problem behaviour'). Nevertheless, virtually all the terms assessed carried negative, rather than neutral or positive, connotations. These results are discussed in terms of the need to devise descriptions that will promote more positive social representations of mental handicap.

ABSTRACTThe authors report two experimental studies which looked at the effects of a matrix training procedure designed to teach children with mental handicaps to use two‐sign combinations. Matrix training involves teaching a specific subset of sign combinations which correspond to the overlapping diagonal cells in a matrix of possible sign combinations. Each study used a matrix of object and location combinations.In the first study, two children were successfully taught to make correct two‐sign combinations, following the teacher's placement of an object in a location. The skill was acquired as a generalised response class, but neither child fully acquired the ability to use sign order to convey meaning.The second experiment showed that only two of four children, who used signs in combination in the natural environment, were sensitive to the linguistic information carried by sign order. An attempt was made to teach the meaning of sign order to the children who were not sensitive to it. A matrix of sign combinations was used, in which the signs functioning as objects could be transposed with those which functioned as locations. These procedures were not successful.The results are discussed with respect to the complex relationships between sign learning and natural language.

ABSTRACTThe authors report two experimental studies which addressed the question of how children with mental handicaps can be taught to generate productive, two‐sign combinations; that is, correctly to recombine signs in a way not previously taught. The basic approach, matrix training, involved teaching a specific subset of sign combinations corresponding to the overlapping diagonal items in a matrix of all possible combinations.In Experiment 1, the matrix items consisted of stimuli produced by combining character and facial expression elements. In Experiment 2, the matrix was formed from colour and object elements. In both studies, matrix training was successful in teaching children to use multiple signs to label the multiple attributes of training items. However, the productive recombination of signs only occurred in Experiment 2, with children who, prior to matrix training itself, had acquired sign labels for the elements which made up the matrix.