A population which has received little attention in the social skills literature is the retarded, especially retarded young persons, who may exhibit substantial social deficits. The current study used a modeling-coaching-rehearsal procedure to teach conversational skills to two moderately retarded a nonretarded peer partner. Training of several social components (fully answering questions asked by a peer, asking the partner questions and extending social invitations) were sequentially trained in a multiple baseline design. Conversational skills can be succesfully trained and they generalize to novel nonretarded peers and to free play interactions with retarded peers. Improvement was largely maintained on followup. The results are discussed with respect to the social implications of improving the conversational appearance and reinforcement value of retarded persons.
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Kelly et al. (1979) studied this question.