Association for Behavior Analysis International

The collection of studies in this symposium will explore behavior analytic teaching procedures across a variety of populations. First, Ashley Greer will present a descriptive analysis examining the various forms of verbal behavior and how children with autism are all attempting to communicate with their mothers regardless of their level of verbal behavior. As a result, parents of children without vocal verbal behavior require parent behavior analytic training tailored to their child's verbal developmental repertoires rather than their chronological age to ensure all communicative opportunities are captured. Second, Kathy Matthews will discuss the effects of implementing behavior analytic teaching procedures in a urban high school to decrease disruptive behaviors. Finally, Benigno Alonso-Alvarez will present a study demonstrating the effects of two behavior analytic procedures to teach Spanish-speaking children with autism article-noun tacts.

A descriptive analysis on the emission of vocal and non-vocal social/verbal interactions between 35 preschool-aged-children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and their mothers was conducted. Using pre-recorded videos of 5-min isolated free-play sessions between the dyads, each occurrence of verbal behavior emitted between the mother and child rotating across listener and speaker responses were transduced. Individual initiated conversational units (speaker-listener-speaker rotations) were isolated across each session. These data were statistically analyzed with previously collected data: child's level of verbal behavior in accordance with multiple verbal behavior assessments, the Autism Diagnosis Observation Schedule-2 (ADOS-2) severity, and the Vineland-3 Adaptive Behavior Scales-Third Edition (VABS-3) scores. Correlations were demonstrated across all assessments. The results did not show a significant difference between the child's level of verbal behavior and the number of child-initiated conversational units emitted with the mother. The differences were, however, indicated across the child's form of verbal behavior -- vocal, non-lexical, and non-vocal verbal behavior. Results are interpreted as parents of children without vocal verbal behavior require parent training tailored to their child's verbal developmental repertoires rather than their chronological age to ensure all communicative opportunities are captured.

We evaluated two procedures for teaching two Spanish-speaking children with ASD to tact masculine and feminine items following the rules that masculine nouns ended in “-o” must be accompanied by the article “el”, and feminine nouns ended in “-a” must be accompanied by the article “la.” First, we used a multiple exemplar instruction procedure with echoic prompts. We taught the children to emit article-noun tacts for several exemplars of masculine and feminine items, and then we evaluated whether they emitted appropriate article-noun tacts for new items. This procedure was effective for one child. For the other child, we implemented a new procedure with 3 steps. In Step 1, we established intraverbal control by the endings “-o” and “-a” over “el” and “la”. We presented masculine and feminine nouns as antecedent stimuli and reinforced the responses “el + noun” for masculine nouns, and “la + noun” for feminine names. In Step 2, we used intraverbal prompts for teaching article-noun tacts. For instance, we presented a strawberry as antecedent stimulus and the intraverbal prompt “fresa” (strawberry, in Spanish). We reinforced the tact “la fresa.” In Step 3, we removed the intraverbal prompts. This procedure was effective with the second child.