Association for Behavior Analysis International

The establishment of auditory-visual conditional discriminations (receptive labeling) is fundamental for successful everyday communication and interactions to occur. Learning auditory-visual conditional discriminations may be challenging and require lengthy training, especially for children with autism or intellectual disabilities. In an auditory-visual conditional discrimination, correct responding requires (a) successive discrimination of the verbal, auditory sample stimuli; (b) simultaneous discrimination of the visual comparison stimuli; and (c) responding to a cross-modal relation between the sample and the comparison stimuli. Due to the complexity of this skill, the use of systematic procedures to establish these discriminations has been an essential component of EIBI. Lovaas (2003) described a discrimination learning procedure designed to assist those learners with a limited verbal repertoire to acquire conditional discriminations using a systematic approach. This procedure includes teaching stimuli through massed trials and intermixing of stimuli. Criticism surrounding this procedure has included the possibility of inadvertently establishing faulty stimulus control during initial training steps, where mass trials are conducted; this may inhibit the desired stimulus control required to establish a conditional discrimination on final steps within the procedure. To avoid such problems, researchers have recommended beginning with a minimum of three stimuli trained semi-randomly from onset using a conditional-only method. In this presentation, pros and cons of these two procedures will be discussed.

To promote communication gains for young autistic children, researchers recommend using 25 evidence-based practices (EBPs), such as reinforcement, modeling, and naturalistic interventions (Steinbrenner et al., 2020). However, educators have called for explicit guidance on what practices to use and when to use them in their routine classroom settings (Brock et al., 2020). In response to this call, our team conducted a secondary analysis of the single-case experimental design and communication-focused studies (n = 164) from the National Clearinghouse on Autism Evidence and Practice (NCAEP) database. We identified practice elements—discrete, observable, measurable practices—common across these EBPs and then classified them as antecedents to or consequence strategies to increase communication behaviors of autistic preschoolers. Our preliminary results suggest that most studies included practice elements such as incorporating child preferences, prompting, reinforcement (e.g., differential, natural, praise), and wait time. In this presentation, we will describe our approach to identifying and classifying these practice elements and describe the results of our investigation. We will then shift to practical application and discussion, highlighting a selection of practice elements and describing with whom and under what conditions they were used.