Teaching Spontaneous Responses to Young Children With Autism

Abstract

Using a multiple probe design across responses, we demonstrated the effectiveness of intensive intervention in establishing spontaneous verbal responses to 2 3-year-old children with autism with generalization to novel settings involving novel persons. Intervention involved discrete-trial instruction (i.e., repeated instructional opportunities presented in close proximity to high rates of reinforcement), specific prompts, and error correction. Spontaneous responses were defined as specific verbal utterances (e.g., the child says ''bless you'') following discriminative stimuli that did not involve explicit vocal directives (e.g., adult sneeze). The development of effective interventions to address the social-communicative needs of very young children with autism is discussed.

Comparison of Simultaneous Prompting and No‐no Prompting in Two‐choice Discrimination Learning With Children With Autism

“…Third, the combination of error correction and remedial trials provides the opportunity for the child to learn from exclusion (Carr, 2003). Although clinicians have implemented no‐no prompting in educational settings with children with autism and professionals have recommended its use in curriculum books and descriptive articles (Harris & Weiss, 1998; Kates‐McElrath & Axelrod, 2006; Leaf & McEachin, 1999), researchers have evaluated the procedure only within a larger teaching package (e.g., Jones, Feeley, & Takacs, 2007), thus making it difficult to assess its effectiveness (Burk, 2008; Lund, Kidd, & Hallam, 2005).…”

A Staff-Training Program to Increase Spontaneous Vocal Requests in Children With Autism

“…For Annie, the trend for spontaneous requesting levels only accelerated during naturalistic training after she received additional instruction to label the preferred items. These results tie into a growing body of literature that suggests that training staff to arrange the environment to present multiple opportunities to vocally request can directly impact this critical communication skill in children with autism (Charlop-Christy, Carpenter, LeBlanc, & Kellet, 2002;Goldstein, 2002;Jones, Feeley, & Takacs, 2007;Taylor & Harris, 1995). Before the onset of this study, the staff participants had been provided with training to use these procedures in the children's cubicles in self-contained special education classrooms.…”

Applied Behavior Analysis for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…The peer, who made the initial greeting, will have probably left by this time, thus removing the opportunity for either child to receive reinforcement. For those behaviors that do have a natural consequence but do not occur often enough, long enough, fast enough and with enough magnitude to obtain reinforcement, it may be beneficial to start training with a contrived reinforcer (e.g., Jones, Feeley, & Takacs, 2007). Baer and Wolf (1970) used the term "behavior trap" to describe how natural contingences can result in significant and efficient behavior change that maintains over time without intervention.…”