Effects of Conditioning Voices as Reinforcers for Listener Responses on Rate of Learning, Awareness, and Preferences for Listening to Stories in Preschoolers With Autism

Abstract

We used a delayed non-concurrent pre- and post-intervention probe design to test the effects of a voice conditioning protocol (VCP) with 3 preschoolers with autism on (a) rate of acquisition of listener curricular objectives, (b) observing voices and the presence of adults across 3 settings, (c) selecting to listen to adults tell stories in free play setting, and (d) the occurrence of stereotypy in the story setting. The VCP conditioned voices as reinforcers for listening to recordings of voices via stimulus-stimulus pairing, which resulted in the children listening to audio recordings of voices in 90% of intervals in 5-min concurrent-operant preference tests. After voices became conditioned reinforcers, all 3 children's learning accelerated; 2 children's observing responses increased in the 3 settings; and 2 children selected to listen to stories and also showed decreased stereotypy in the story setting. The data suggest that conditioned reinforcement for observing responses may be a verbal behavior developmental cusp that acts to accelerate learning that involves listening, and that the cusp may be induced using the VCP.

Is the Source of Reinforcement for Naming Multiple Conditioned Reinforcers for Observing Responses?

“…The child must both listen to the voice and look at the visual stimulus (or contact other sensory stimuli), and reinforcement for one or both observing responses may need to be present for echoic behavior to join listener and speaker repertoires. Dinsmoor (1983), Greer and Han (2014), and Greer et al (2011b) demonstrated that observing responses could be conditioned and that doing so increased rates of learning of related discriminations. Most notably, after 2-dimensional visual stimuli and the observing response of looking at 2-dimensional stimuli were conditioned as reinforcers, participants acquired generalized visual identity-matching repertoires and increased correct responding across listener responses (Greer and Han 2014).…”

Effects of response‐contingent stimulus pairing on vocalizations of nonverbal children with autism

“…Greer, Pistoljevic, Cahill, and Du () evaluated the effects of RCP to establish the speech of others as a conditioned reinforcer for three children with ASD. The RCP condition consisted of allowing the child to press a button under a free‐operant arrangement.…”

Aquisição de intraverbais em crianças com autismo: efeitos do pareamento de estímulos e respostas ecoicas

“…No entanto, com o decorrer da implementação, a cuidadora relatou para a experimentadora que o participante emitia as relações intraverbais (ex., "machado em inglês é ax") fora do ambiente experimental. Com base nessa informação e no conhecimento sobre a função discriminativa/reforçadora que a mãe/cuidadora exerce desde cedo no desenvolvimento infantil (Greer, Pistoljevic, Cahill, & Du, 2011;Longano & Greer, 2015;Petursdottir & Lepper, 2015;Petursdottir, Carp, Matthies, & Esch, 2011), uma vez finalizada a implementação dos 51 ciclos previstos para os casos nos quais os participantes não alcançassem o critério de aprendizagem, foi realizada uma sessão de teste de intraverbal aplicado pela cuidadora no ambiente experimental (sob supervisão da experimentadora) 6 . Neste teste (teste (mãe) na Figura 2), P1 apresentou 100% de respostas intraverbais corretas nas relações de ambos os tratamentos.…”