Some children with autism have difficulty acquiring tacts, despite their ability to mand, echo words, and imitate actions. The current study focused on 2 nonvocal children who had acquired a few mands using sign language, but had repeatedly failed to acquire signed tacts. Two procedures were compared to determine the most effective approach for training tacts to these participants. One procedure (the standard condition) used the general verbal prompt "What is that?" The other procedure (the intraverbal condition) used a specific intraverbal prompt "Sign [spoken word]." The results showed that both participants acquired nonimitative verbal responses during the intraverbal condition but not during the standard condition. One participant demonstrated complete transfer to pure tacts, and the other participant showed a partial transfer to pure tacts. These results have implications for the design of language intervention programs for children with autism who have difficulty acquiring tacts.
Researchers have previously suggested that interventions designed to decrease stereotypic behavior are most effective when they include access to stimuli that are matched to the specific sensory consequences hypothesized to maintain the stereotypy. In an attempt to replicate this finding, we used stimulus preference assessments and a reversal design to evaluate the effectiveness of noncontingent access to highly preferred stimuli that were matched to the specific sensory consequences hypothesized to be maintaining the stereotypic behavior of an individual with developmental disabilities. The participant was also given noncontingent access to a highly preferred edible stimulus as a control condition. Results indicated that noncontingent access to a matched sensory stimulus produced consistent decreases in aberrant behavior while access to a highly preferred edible stimulus did not.
Three preschoolers diagnosed with autism were taught how to expressively label common food items using video instruction with and without embedded text. Twenty unknown stimuli were randomly assigned to either the embedded text or no-embedded text condition. Using a commercially available video editing program, a DVD was created that presented test stimuli (photographs of food items) with the auditory instruction: “What is it?” followed by the auditory presentation of the name of the stimulus. Stimuli in the embedded text condition also included the typed name of the item below the picture. All instruction was presented via a DVD player and viewed on a 19-inch television. Probe sessions were conducted after teaching sessions via the DVD player to assess correct responses. While the impact of including embedded text was somewhat unclear, all participants acquired expressive object labeling skills by watching the DVD.
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