Teaching young children with developmental disabilities to request more play using the behaviour chain interruption strategy

Three young children with developmental disabilities and severe communication impairments were taught to request more play using the behaviour chain interruption strategy (BCIS). With this strategy, the child's ongoing play behaviour is blocked or interrupted to create the need for the child to request more. Instruction occurred in the midst of two play routines with probes conducted to assess generalisation to one other play routine and to the beginning of the activities. A multiple-baseline across subjects design demonstrated that the BCIS was effective in teaching two of the three children to request more. For these two children, generalisation to an untrained play activity was also noted. Only one of these children, however, also used the newly acquired request to initiate play. These results extend previous research on teaching communication skills to children with developmental disabilities and severe communication impairment by demonstrating the effectiveness of BCIS in the context of play activities within early intervention programmes. Student characteristics which may predict the effectiveness of the procedure are discussed.