Relational Ability and Language Performance in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders and Typically Developing Children: A Further Test of the TARPA Protocol

Correlating derived relational responding with linguistic and cognitive ability in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…Moran et al (2010) showed a correlation between derived coordinate relational responding as measured using the TARPA and adaptive behaviour as measured by the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (VABS) in several children with ASD. More recently, Moran et al (2014) extended this work by correlating a more comprehensive and systematic TARPA protocol with the Preschool Language Scale 4th Edition (PLS-4) in both children with ASD as well as typically developing children. The current research aimed to extend these previous studies.…”

“…The test for TOF was changed in a number of ways. Hierarchical analysis performed by Moran et al (2014) indicated a number of instances in which participants passed the TOF test despite failing the previous test of combinatorial entailment, contrary to (and contributing to a disconfirmation of) the expected order. It was speculated that these participants might be passing the TOF test through a combination of chance and consistent responding.…”

“…This protocol, the Training and Assessment of Relational Precursors and Abilities (TARPA; Kishita, Ohtsuki & Stewart, 2013;Moran, Stewart, McElwee, & Ming, 2010;Moran, Stewart, McElwee, & Ming 2014), tests a number of key forms of responding that are critical (from an RFT perspective) to the development of this repertoire and thus generative verbal behaviour. These forms include (i) basic or simple discrimination; (ii) non-arbitrary [i.e., based on formal or physical properties] conditional discrimination; (iii) arbitrary [i.e., experimenter-designated] conditional discrimination; (iv) mutually entailed relational responding [e.g., deriving the symmetrical relation B !…”

“…For instance, a number of participants showed weaker responding on sections involving exclusively auditory stimuli than on sections involving at least some visual stimuli, irrespective of the strength of their overall performance. Moran et al (2014) recently extended this work by correlating a more comprehensive and systematic TARPA protocol with the Preschool Language Scale 4th Edition (PLS-4), a mainstream performance-based language assessment, in ten additional children with ASD (Experiment 1) and 13 typically developing children (Experiment 2). This study also involved conducting an order analysis of the TARPA.…”

“…First, a larger sample of children with ASD was employed than in either of the previous studies. More specifically, whereas Moran et al (2010) and Moran et al (2014) used samples of ASD participants of 5 and 10 respectively, the current study employed a sample of 35. Second, in order to measure TARPA test-retest reliability, approximately half of the children assessed (n = 17) were retested with a completely new set of stimuli within 2 weeks 2 of the first test.…”