Relationship between degree of infant handicap and clarity of infant cues.

Dunst (1983) suggested that severely handicapped infants' intentional and unintentional communicative behaviors may be less interpretable or less easily "read" than are those of less handicapped infants. This hypothesis was tested in a sample of 15 pairs of mothers and their handicapped 11-month-old infants. As expected, the results indicated that coders agreed on the occurrence of an infant cue a lower percentage of the time when coding severely handicapped infants than when coding less handicapped infants.