Efficiency of expressive and receptive language teaching in children with autism spectrum disorder

Research in Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) investigated the efficiency of receptive and expressive language interventions in learners with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Listener responding by function, feature and class (LRFFC) and intraverbal (FFC) are some types of receptive and expressive language, respectively, which were targets in investigations. The previous literature demonstrated experimentally that teaching intraverbal first is more efficient, in the sense that it produced a better emergence effect of related untaught LRFFC in children with ASD, contrary to the recommendation by a traditional literature, which suggests that receptive skills, such as the LRFFC, should be taught first. The current research had the goal to compare the efficiency of intraverbal and LRFFC training as well, considering the effects on the possible emergence of related untaught repertoire in two children with ASD. The difference from the previous literature was that, during the teaching of LRFFC responses, the tact (labeling) of pictures involved was also taught, considering that this was a recommendation of previous research. The purpose was to assess if tact training would increase the efficiency of LRFFC training. The results showed that both instructional sequences (training LRFFC - probing intraverbal; training intraverbal - probing LRFFC) successfully established emergent responding, regarding the untaught related repertoire for both participants. However, intraverbal training produced emergence of LRFFC to a lesser extent for both. Data were discussed in the sense that tact training during LRFFC training probably increased its efficiency and that preexisting skills, regarding each participant, also influenced the efficiency of teaching.

Effects of Tact Prompts on Acquisition and Maintenance of Divergent Intraverbal Responses by a Child With Autism

This study investigated the effects of tact prompts on the acquisition and retention of divergent intraverbal responding to categorical questions involving conditional discriminations. A 6-year-old boy with autism participated in the study. A multiple probe design across behaviors was used. A tact-prompt procedure was implemented. The results suggested that the tact-prompt procedure was effective to establish and increase the number of divergent intraverbal responses to questions across two categories. The child spontaneously emitted novel responses during training and generalization probe sessions, indicating occurrences of response generalization after divergent intraverbal training. Maintenance probes showed that divergent intraverbal responses were maintained at high levels for all target categorical questions 3 weeks after the completion of training.