Association for Behavior Analysis International

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may exhibit deficits in language and social communication; therefore, behavioral intervention needs to ameliorate deficits in verbal behavior and expand relevant repertoires. Continuous refinement of procedures to assess and teach these skills is needed to promote efficacious and efficient intervention strategies, which should produce meaningful outcomes for clients. This symposium will present empirical data from research projects aimed at identifying efficacious and efficient procedures to teach and expand the verbal repertoires of children with ASD. Chance, Cividini-Motta, and Livingston will present on a comparison of methods used to condition echoic behavior as reinforcers to increase vocalizations. Niland et al. will describe the results of a comparison of isolated and compound stimulus presentations to teach auditory tacts. Scott et al. will describe the results of a comparison of different antecedent verbal stimuli on the acquisition and emergence of bidirectional intraverbals. Finally, Guerrero et al. will report on a comparison of procedures to teach multiply-controlled verbal behavior, short story recall. Presentations will be followed by a discussion of applied implications and future directions.

Applied researchers and applied practitioners

Tacts are verbal operants evoked by some object, event, or stimulus feature, and tacts should occur in the presence of stimuli across all five senses. An example of an auditory tact is saying “siren” upon hearing the high-pitched noise of an ambulance. We replicated and extended a study by Hanney, Carr, and LeBlanc (2019) by examining the efficacy and efficiency of three different stimulus-presentation conditions including: (a) isolated, (b) compound with known visual stimulus, and (c) compound with unknown visual stimulus. We evaluated the acquisition of auditory tacts with an adapted alternating treatments design embedded within a nonconcurrent multiple-baseline design across sets with two children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). All three conditions were efficacious with at least one set of stimuli for each participant. However, the compound conditions were more likely to lead to mastery in the least amount of time. In transfer probes, isolated stimuli were presented as compound stimuli and compound stimuli were presented in isolation; correct auditory tacts emitted throughout probes indicated appropriate control of auditory stimuli persisted. Implications for future applied research and application to practice will be discussed.

Reading comprehension is an important early academic skill that may pose challenges for some children with autism. Prior research (Valentino, Conine, Delfs, & Furlow 2015) has reported effective methods for teaching children with autism to retell short stories that were previously read to them, as a possible first step in establishing a reading comprehension repertoire. We replicated and extended this prior work with three school-aged children with autism using a multiple baseline across stories and a non-concurrent multiple baseline across participants. Participants were exposed to an initial baseline, a reading with reinforcement condition (treatment 1), and a backward chaining with textual prompts condition (treatment 2). All three participants emitted mastery-level recall of stories more rapidly and under less complex intervention procedures than in prior research. Improvements in story recall were associated with increases in correct answers to basic comprehension questions, and intervention also resulted in generalized improvements in recall across multiple stories. We also conducted standardized reading assessments with all participants before and after completion of the study. These data have important implications for behavior analysts and educators providing reading intervention to children with autism and suggest several possible avenues for future research on reading comprehension and recall.