Association for Behavior Analysis International

Children without naming skills may have to learn new speaker and listener behavior through the direct reinforcement and/or corrections by other people. Naming allows children to learn these verbal functions from incidental experiences. Experiments trying to clarify the basic processes of how children acquire naming could both contribute to a greater understanding of determinants of language development, and to the development of effective procedures for use in applied settings. We present two research projects related to establishment of naming in preschool children with autism. The first paper reports using an operant discrimination procedure to condition social stimuli as reinforcers as intervention to acquire naming skills. Then, the operants included in naming were exposed for these consequences through singular exemplar instruction. The second paper reports the effects of a sufficient exemplar training procedure in establishing naming in three children. The results showed that training one exemplar at a time to mastery could be an effective procedure.

Naming is defined as a verbal capacity where a child will respond both as a listener and as a speaker after hearing and observing another person give name to a stimulus. A common way to teach naming is training sets of exemplars concurrently. The aim of the present study was to examine whether a sufficient exemplar procedure, training listener and speaker behavior for one item at a time, could result in naming. Naming probes were conducted prior to training of each untrained exemplars to see if generalization to new exemplars occurred. The probes consisted of the experimenter first tacting an item while the participants were observing, and then conducting listener and speaker probes to see if the participants could identify the item. Generalization probes were conducted to observe if generalization from training to other settings and people occurred. A non-concurrent multiple probe design was used to evaluate the effect of the intervention for three pre-school children with autism. Results showed that two out of three participants showed naming skills, and the third participant improved her performance. The results suggest that a sufficient exemplar training procedure is effective in establishing naming. Sufficient exemplar training seems especially suitable for monitoring generalization effects during intervention as it allows for a large degree of individualization.