Establishing Generative Yes/No Responses in Developmentally Disabled Children

Abstract

We evaluated the effects of two procedures for teaching four developmentally disabled children to respond yes/no appropriately. During baseline, tutoring was conducted in which five known items were individually presented with the question, "Is this a ----?", followed either by access to requested items or by remedial prompting contingent on responding. When tutoring did not improve performance, instruction was embedded in the regular classroom activities. In this condition, items requested by students were either presented or withheld on the basis of their response to the question, "Do you want ----?". Increases in correct responding were confirmed by a multiple-baseline design across all four students and were maintained with the introduction of new items. However, generalization to "Is this a ----?" questions did not occur in the tutoring setting until specifically programmed. Subsequently, students also demonstrated appropriate yes/no responding to questions involving actions, possession, and spatial relations.

Teaching Receptive Discriminations to Children With Autism: A Comparison of Traditional and Embedded Discrete Trial Teaching

“…However, embedded instruction was used to teach mands and DTT was used to teach imitation and receptive labeling. Other similar comparative studies in this literature have suffered from similar confounds (e.g., Koegel & Williams, 1980;Neef, Walters, & Egel, 1984;Williams, Koegel, & Egel, 1981).…”

The Facilitative Effects of Incidental Teaching on Preposition Use by Autistic Children

“…Substantial generalization resulted from use of (a) a "mand-model" technique with language-deficient preschool children (Rogers-Warren & Warren, 1980), (b) a "delay procedure" with severely language-delayed retarded children (Halle, Baer, & Spradlin, 1981), (c) "loose training" with moderately retarded children (Campbell & Stremel-Campbell, 1982), (d) "natural language training" with nonverbal autistic children (Koegel & O'Dell, 1982), and (e) "embedded instruction" with developmentally delayed, severely language-disordered children (Neef, Walters, & Egel, 1984). Although various components of these procedures differed from standard incidental teaching formats, each application involved prompting language in the context of naturally occurring stimuli.…”

Factors affecting responses of children with autism spectrum disorder to yes/no questions

“…of participants' chronological age (CA), IQ, estimated mental age (MA), receptive vocabulary age (VA), and PARS-peak, and PARS-present scores. Neef et al (1984), which was revised to suit the present objectives. The test of Neef et al comprised two types of subtests: the naming true-false subtest, which examines whether the name of an item is true or false, and the request-intention subtest, which examines the presence of the intentions of a request.…”