Evaluating the Effects of Similar and Distinct Discriminative Stimuli During Auditory Conditional Discrimination Training With Children With Autism

Abstract

Children with autism are often taught auditory conditional discriminations in the form of personal information questions that might prove useful in conversation (e.g., "What is your favorite food?" "Pizza" and "What is your favorite color?" "Purple"). In these questions, the auditory stimuli presented as part of the compound discriminative stimulus (i.e., what, favorite, color/food) do not always simultaneously control responding. If all components of the auditory stimulus do not control responding, a child may master 1 target but have trouble acquiring subsequent targets that have a component of a previously learned auditory stimulus because the previously learned response is emitted. One way to avoid this problem is to teach many targets that have no overlapping component stimuli before introducing targets that include a previously learned component. Another way to avoid the problem is to systematically introduce overlapping stimulus components simultaneously to facilitate control by all relevant components. Three children with autism were taught auditory conditional discriminations. An adapted alternating-treatments design was used to compare the use of training sets with programmed overlap of component auditory stimuli to training sets with no overlap of stimulus components. The effects of these 2 arrangements were evaluated on trials to criterion and percentage accuracy during acquisition. All participants reached mastery faster with at least 1 target set in the nonoverlap condition compared to the overlapping condition; 2 out of the 3 participants met the mastery criteria for both overlapping and nonoverlapping targets at a similar rate by the 3rd training set.

Review of Methods to Equate Target Sets in the Adapted Alternating Treatments Design

“…That is, if the target response is the vocal response "cat" and "rat," the effects on acquisition may vary if the antecedent is a textual, visual, or auditory stimulus. Aguirre et al (2019) evaluated the acquisition of intraverbal relations for three participants with ASD across sets of targets that differed based on the degree of overlap in the antecedent verbal stimuli. In the overlapping condition, the antecedent verbal stimuli shared some feature (e.g., "what color is a basketball" "what color is the sun"), while the nonoverlapping condition included targets with no shared features (e.g., "What do you smell with" "what says woof woof").…”

A systematic review of empirical intraverbal research: 2015–2020

“…We also noted differences compared to previous reviews. Our findings suggest there has been an increase in studies targeting multiple control (e.g., Aguirre et al., 2019; Alzrayer, 2020; DeSouza et al., 2019; Ingvarsson et al., 2016; Kisamore et al., 2016; Shillingsburg et al., 2018). This is promising given the need, previously discussed, to increase the number of controlling variables in verbal behavior and intraverbal research.…”

“…And Aguirre et al. (2019) implemented a tact prompt during intraverbal training after consecutive sessions of low scores with an echoic prompt. However, this modification was not effective for the participant to achieve mastery criterion.…”

A comparison of two teaching procedures to establish generalized intraverbal‐tacting in children with autism

“…Previous research suggests that differences in stimulus complexity may play a role in the acquisition of intraverbal conditional discriminations. For example, Aguirre et al (2019) taught intraverbal responding to verbal antecedents containing overlapping (e.g., "What vehicle is small? ", "What toy is small?")…”

“…Applied research has mainly focused on establishing specific intraverbal responses with respect to the feature, function, and class of items (DeSouza et al, 2019;Ingvarsson et al, 2016;Jahr, 2001) and to two-component questions (e.g., "What's an animal that's red? "; Aguirre et al, 2019;Kisamore et al, 2016) using a range of strategies, such as echoic to intraverbal or tact to intraverbal transfer procedures, multiple exemplar training, blocked trials, and discrimination training (see DeSouza et al, 2017;Stauch et al, 2017 for reviews). A number of studies have shown that an echoic Differential Observing Response (DOR) procedure, whereby children echo the critical part of the verbal antecedent prior to the target response, can facilitate differential intraverbal responding (Jahr, 2001;Kisamore et al, 2013Kisamore et al, , 2016.…”