Association for Behavior Analysis International

Background: Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT) has demonstrated significant increase in functional language and communication for all types of children with autism spectrum disorders (Koegel et al., 1999; Koegel, 2000; Koegel et al., 2003). Typically, utilization of PRT occurs with children diagnosed with ASD, either verbal or nonverbal. Over the past several years, generalization of PRT techniques beyond ASD has been examined, with increased functional verbal output demonstrated not only in ASD, but also in children with other developmental concerns, including global developmental delay, speech delay, and Down syndrome (Northington, et al., 2018&2016; Northington & Shelton, 2015). Not only are results of PRT generalizable among children with a variety of developmental concerns, but with adults with cognitive impairments as well (LeBlanc, et al., 2007). Treatments that utilize neurotypical peers also demonstrate significant improvements in the social skills of neuroatypical individuals (Maich et al., 2015). It seems that by increasing the functional communication in neuroatypical children, their verbal output will begin to match that of their neurotypical peers. Objectives: To demonstrate the efficacy of PRT and to examine if differences in functional output exists between the two groups after treatment. Methods: Data from three children were analyzed. All three children were aged 4-years when data were collected as part of ongoing treatment. One girl was diagnosed with Down syndrome; the second with ASD; and the third was neurotypical. Data were collected utilizing ten-minute video segments and were analyzed to examine increase in verbal measures for all children. Results: All three children demonstrated increases in functional communication after intervention. A two-tailed independent samples t-test will be utilized to compare the best functional verbal utterances. When results were analyzed for boys, there was no significant difference in words uttered (t(1) = 0.038, p = 0.976). A two-tailed independent samples t-test will be utilized to compare best mean length of utterance. When results were analyzed for boys, there was no significant difference in the length of utterance (t(1) = 0.772, p = 0.602). Conclusions: PRT is an effective method for achieving significant improvement in functional communication and can be utilized with neurotypical and neuroatypical individuals with great success.

The current study investigated the effects of an intraverbal webbing procedure on the development of divergent and convergent intraverbal responses in three children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) between the ages of 4 and 7 years old, using a multiple probe across participants design. The results demonstrated that the intraverbal webbing procedure was effective in the acquisition of trained verbal responses to fill-in-the blank statements regarding the function, feature, and class of several items. In addition, emergence of convergent and divergent intraverbal responses was observed across untrained categories.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of speech therapy on one individual’s use of Siri to expand reinforcers, use self-management techniques, and communicate (call and/or text an individual). The participant has a diagnosis of speech language impairment and has difficulty using Siri due to articulation/phonological errors including: stopping, fronting, and final consonant deletion. Utilizing an alternating treatment design, speech therapy will occur using one of two target sets: functional phrases and nonsense phrases. Outcomes will guide clinicians in functional target selection.

Asian population is the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States and Asian parents often hold different opinions on family functioning and childrearing. However, there has been no research conducted to examine how to best train parents from Asian immigrant backgrounds to teach manding to their child with autism at home. A behavioral skills training (BST) package was utilized to teach three Asian parents to train their children with autism aged between 6-12 to mand for preferred items. A multiple baseline across participants design was used to evaluate the effects of parent training on parent participants’ implementation of mand training task analysis and the effects of the intervention on the acquisition of independent mands of their children. All three parents demonstrated improvement in implementing mand training procedures following the parent training delivered by BST. In addition, all three children demonstrated increased independent mands after receiving mand training from their parents and two demonstrated criterion performance. Maintenance and generalization probes were conducted with two parent-child dyads and showed positive results. Implications of the findings and characteristics of supporting Asian immigrants with children with autism are discussed.

Researches have defined subsequences of verbal developmental cusps to help the children with language delay emit verbal behavior as speaker-as-own-listener. Auditory discrimination is one of listener cusps that plays essential roles for children’s verbal behavior. In this study, we used a multiple probe across participants experimental design to evaluate the effects of the accelerated auditory Match-to-Sample (AMTS) procedure on the accuracy of echoic responses of three preschoolers with language delay. The AMTS procedure consisted 8 basic phases and 13 advanced phases that increased in difficulty with each subsequent phase, and it required participants to match exemplar to target sounds. We measured the accuracy of echoic responses by calculating the number of words emitted with point-to-point correspondence from a list of 100 English words emitted by the participants. A functional relation was demonstrated as all three participants showed an increase in the number of full echoic responses after the completion of the AMTS procedure. The results of the study were aligned with results shown by Choi, Greer and Keohane (2015). The auditory matching provided opportunities for children with language delays to discriminate sounds and words.