Adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) often have deficits in interpersonal skills due to limited social-communication opportunities. Knowing how to engage in “small talk” or simple social conversational exchanges can be beneficial in postsecondary schooling, employment sites, community environments, and social gatherings. Recently, covert audio coaching (CAC) showed a positive impact on increasing conversational exchanges. As the COVID-19 pandemic increased the need for remote delivery tools, we explored the effectiveness of remote audio coaching (RAC) to teach this skill to college students with IDD. We used a multiple baseline design across participants to examine whether RAC might increase on-topic, small talk conversational exchanges. Results demonstrated that RAC effectively increased small talk skills between participants and a confederate. Upon removal of RAC, all participants still performed above their baselines, with two participants maintaining near mastery levels 2 weeks after the intervention was removed. Limitations and future research are discussed.

由于社交交流机会有限，智障和发育障碍（IDD）的成年人通常人际交往能力不足。知道如何进行“闲聊”或简单的社交对话交流，对于中学后教育，就业场所，社区环境和社交聚会都是有益的。最近，秘密音频教练（CAC）对增加对话交流产生了积极影响。随着COVID-19大流行增加了对远程交付工具的需求，我们探索了远程音频教练（RAC）的有效性，以向IDD的大学生教授这一技能。我们在参与者之间使用了多个基准设计，以检查RAC是否可以增加话题性的闲聊对话交流。结果表明，RAC有效地提高了参与者与同盟之间的交谈技巧。移除RAC后，所有参与者的表现仍高于基线，其中两名参与者在移除干预后2周保持了精通水平。局限性和未来的研究进行了讨论。