Effects of time delay and requiring echoics on answering questions about visual stimuli

Abstract

An important communication skill for children with autism is answering multiple questions about visual stimuli (e.g., "What is it?" "What color is it?"). We targeted answering "What number?" and "What shape?" in the presence of numbers inside shapes, and "What is it?" and "What color?" in the presence of colored objects (e.g., a yellow cat) with 3 preschoolers with autism. In addition to a progressive time delay, we required the participants to answer the questions by echoing a keyword from the questions. For example, we taught them to answer, "What color?" with "color blue." In the context of a multiple-probe design across behaviors within a multipleprobe design across participants, the procedure was effective in increasing trained responses and producing within-and across-category generalization. The echoic may have facilitated the responses by increasing the salience of the auditory stimuli and strengthening intraverbals within autoclitic frames.

A comparison of two teaching procedures to establish generalized intraverbal‐tacting in children with autism

“…The study builds on prior research using similar procedures to establish question discrimination with verbal frames (degli Espinosa et al, 2020;Meleshkevich et al, 2020), but is the first to include a No Frame condition, enabling direct within-subject comparisons of the two procedures. Beneficial effects of the Frame procedure were observed with Jake, Alice, and Adam.…”

“…While these studies on intraverbal responding focused on teaching specific responses to specific questions, two recent studies (degli Espinosa et al, 2020;Meleshkevich et al, 2020) have focused on establishing generalized discrimination of specific questions (i.e., "What is it?" vs. "What color?")…”

“…Following mastery of this final step, near errorless intraverbal-tacting and generalized use of the frame to novel exemplars within and across stimulus classes was demonstrated for both children. Meleshkevich et al (2020) established generalized intraverbal-tacting in response to the verbal antecedents "What shape?" and "What number?"…”

“…In addition, children responded to novel visual stimuli by using the learned verbal frames. The observed generalized intraverbal-tacting to novel untaught compound stimuli may have resulted from the additive, multiple, and generalizable verbal control exerted by teaching children to echo the conditional critical term within an autoclitic frame (e.g., "It's a [cat], "It says [meow], "Color [brown]") in response to the verbal antecedent (degli Espinosa et al, 2020;Meleshkevich et al, 2020).…”

“…However, because the frame procedure was the sole procedure used in the only two published studies on intraverbal-tacting (degli Espinosa et al, 2020;Meleshkevich et al, 2020), it is not possible to conclusively determine whether the frame was necessary for producing generalized responding, or whether more traditional conditional discrimination training procedures would be sufficient to establish conditional control of the verbal antecedent over the relevant discriminative nonverbal property, irrespective of the verbal frame. Therefore, the present study sought to delineate the effect of autoclitic frames in generalized intraverbal-tacting by comparing frame procedures such as those previously described (degli Espinosa et al, 2020;Meleshkevich et al, 2020) to otherwise similar conditional-discrimination procedures without verbal frame training.…”