Establishing Five Derived Mands in Three Adolescent Boys With Autism

Abstract

Three 14-year-old boys with diagnoses of autism learned to mand for the delivery or removal of tokens by presenting nonsense syllables (A(1-5), respectively). A match-to-sample procedure was used to establish conditional discriminations between the 5 A stimuli and 5 B stimuli and between the B stimuli and 5 C stimuli. Subsequently, each participant was able to use the C stimuli to mand, illustrating a transfer of function, although 1 participant first required multiple-exemplar training.

The fruits of a functional approach for psychological science

“…Indeed, as touched upon earlier, we now know (a) that AARR correlates strongly with verbal ability; (b) that it also emerges before verbal ability is established, suggesting that the former underpins the latter; (c) that the emergence of increasingly complex language abilities closely coincides with the development of increasingly complex forms of AARR; (d) that AARR shows all the properties of an operant behaviour; (e) that the concept of AARR can be used to model key features of language including grammar, syntax and rule‐based learning and (f) that AARR training with meaningless stimuli can nonetheless produce substantial improvement in standardised measures of verbal ability, which both further supports the idea that AARR underpins language and also illustrates the practical utility of this concept (e.g. Berens & Hayes, ; Cassidy et al, ; Luciano et al, ; Moran, Stewart, McElwee, & Ming, ; Murphy & Barnes‐Holmes, ; O'Hora, Barnes‐Holmes, Roche, & Smeets, ; O'Hora, Barnes‐Holmes, & Stewart, ; Stewart, Barnes‐Holmes, & Roche, ; Weil, Hayes, & Capurro, ).…”

A Review of Recommendations for Sequencing Receptive and Expressive Language Instruction

“…Barnes‐Holmes, Barnes‐Holmes, Roche, & Smeets, 2001a, 2001b; Y. Barnes‐Holmes, Barnes‐Holmes, Smeets, Strand, & Friman, 2004; Berens & Hayes, 2007; Gomez, Lopez, Martin, Barnes‐Holmes, & Barnes‐Holmes, 2007; C. Luciano, Becerra, & Valverde, 2004; Murphy & Barnes‐Holmes, 2010). Although most of these studies have not included an assessment of untrained vocal responses, a few studies (Fiorile & Greer, 2007; Greer, Stolfi, Chavez‐Brown, & Rivera‐Valdes, 2005; Greer, Stolfi, & Pistoljevic, 2007; Speckman‐Collins, Park, & Greer, 2007) specifically have evaluated the multiple‐exemplar procedures for tacts and listener behavior described in Greer and Ross (2008) with participants with autism spectrum disorders.…”

Facilitating derived requesting skills with a touchscreen tablet computer for children with autism spectrum disorder

“…Across two experiments, one using a pretest/posttest design and the other a multiple probe across participants design, all but one of the participants (P4) demonstrated derived manding and the requisite derived relations. Taken together, these findings add to the growing evidence base of applied relational frame theory studies synthesizing verbal operants with derived relational responding (Halvey & Rehfeldt, 2005;[ 3 3 _ T D $ D I F F ] May, Hawkins, & Dymond, 2013;Murphy & Barnes-Holmes, 2010;Rehfeldt & Root, 2005;Rosales & Rehfeldt, 2007).…”

“…Indeed, synthesizing mand training procedures with instructional procedures for establishing derived relational responding allows one to study untrained or derived requesting (Halvey & Rehfeldt, 2005;Murphy & Barnes-Holmes, 2010;Rehfeldt & Root, 2005;Rosales & Rehfeldt, 2007). An instance of derived requesting is a request for an object or action that has not been reinforced in the past, is not the result of direct pairing with a reinforced mand, and does not physically resemble an object that previously reinforced the mand (generalization; Barnes-Holmes, Barnes-Holmes, & Cullinan, 2000).…”