| Abstract: Adolescents with developmental disability often struggle with developing social relationships. Learning appropriate conversational skills can be an important first step to promote interaction with peers. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the teaching procedures could be used to teach conversational skills to three adolescents with autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disability ages 14–18 years old. The additional purpose of the paper was to describe the all process that leaded to define the skill components describing the conversational skills in order to identificate the most functional intervention to implement in a group setting. The first study evaluated the effects of modeling and contingent feedback on the acquisition of conversational skills (to initiate conversation and to respond to questions). A multiple probe design across participants was implemented. Results suggest the need to increment the numbers conversational skills for each participant in particular to initiate conversation. For this reason the second study evaluated the effects of video-based group instruction on extending conversation. Extending conversation was defined as: eyes oriented toward the peer, vocal acknowledged of the original statement within 3 s, emission of a question to learn more about event or item (Stauch, Plavnick, Sankar, & Gallagher, 2018). A multiple probe design across participants was implemented. Results revealed an increase of conversational skills for two out of three participants. In the third study we evaluated the effects of modeling and contingent feedback on conversational skills defined as: Initiation and Response (Follow-Up Question, Comment, Obligatory Response, Other-requests, Gestural feedback) (Bambara et. all., 2018). A multiple probe design across participants was implemented. Results revealed an increase in performance for all the participants in particular for the response skills. This study provides additional evidence related to the importance of defining a complex ability like the conversational skill and to design intervention that could better be implemented for adolescents with developmental disability in a group setting. |