The Effects of Listener and Speaker Training on Emergent Relations in Children With Autism

Abstract

The current study assessed the use of standard conditional discrimination (i.e., listener) and textual/tact (i.e., speaker) training in the establishment of equivalence classes containing dictated names, tacts/textual responses, pictures and printed words. Four children (ages 5 to 7 years) diagnosed with autism were taught to select pictures and printed words in the presence of their dictated names, and to emit the tact or textual response corresponding to a presented picture or printed word. Both speaker and listener training resulted in the formation of stimulus classes for 3 of 4 participants.

A further evaluation of the effects of listener training on derived categorization and speaker behavior in children with autism

“…Future research should directly test this possibility, as well as compare the efficiency of using standardized assessments versus directly assessing the naming repertoire by training and testing word-object bidirectionality. This study supports previous research, which posits that, in the presence of a naming repertoire, listener training alone may be sufficient to produce essentially three skills at once: listener behavior, speaker behavior, and categorization (e.g., Sprinkle & Miguel, 2012). While additional research is required to more precisely identify a benchmark standard for the presence of naming, findings of this study are in line with the assertion that naming develops around the age of 36 months (Greer & Longano, 2010).…”

An Abbreviated Evaluation of the Efficiency of Listener and Tact Instruction for Children with Autism

“…For six of the eight participants in the current study, tact training was more likely to lead to the emergence of listener skills than vice versa, replicating findings from previous research (e.g., Sprinkle & Miguel, 2012;Wynn & Smith, 2003). For the remaining two participants, tact training and listener training were equally likely to lead to the emergence of additional responses.…”

“…Several recent experimental studies have specifically compared tact and listener training with participants with ASD (Wynn & Smith, 2003;Sprinkle & Miguel, 2012;Delfs, Conine, Frampton, Shillingsburg, & Robinson, 2014). Across studies, sets of stimuli were randomly assigned to either tact or listener training and probes were conducted to evaluate the emergence of the untrained responses.…”

“…These results suggest that individualized assessment may still be necessary to detect individuals for whom the above assumptions are not true. Second, emergent relations were equivalent across training conditions for some subjects in and Sprinkle and Miguel (2012). In such cases, determining the most efficient training condition would require the evaluation of additional criteria such as trials-to-criterion, maintenance, and learner preference (Wolery, Ault, Doyle, 1992).…”

Establishing initial auditory‐visual conditional discriminations and emergence of initial tacts in young children with autism spectrum disorder

“…This finding appears to be unique in the behavior‐analytic literature, as a diligent search of the literature failed to find any cases in which the initial tacts of a child with ASD (or other developmental disability) emerged to this degree following listener training. In fact, although a full review of this literature is beyond the scope of this discussion, even among children with ASD with preexisting listener and tact repertoires, researchers have generally found inconsistent transfer from listener to speaker responding (Bao, Sweatt, Lechago, & Antal, ; Delfs et al, ; Ingvarsson, Cammilleri, & Macias, ; Lechago, Carr, Kisamore, & Grow, ; Petursdottir & Carr, ; Sprinkle & Miguel, ; but see DeSouza, Fisher, & Rodriguez, , and Kobari‐Wright & Miguel, , for notable exceptions). Future research should attempt to replicate the procedures used with Marco and Colton to determine the generality of our preliminary findings.…”