Improving oral sentence production in children with cochlear implants: effects of equivalence-based instruction and matrix training

Abstract

Children who use cochlear implants (CI) and who are readers usually produce more accurate speech in response to text than to pictures. Equivalence-based instruction (EBI) can be a route to establish functional interdependence between these verbal operants. The present study investigated whether children with CI who read would improve speech accuracy when tacting pictures of scenes after EBI that included dictated sentences, pictures of scenes, and printed sentences. This study evaluated whether teaching verbal relations to diagonal sentences from a matrix with subject-verb-object combinations promoted recombinative generalization to untrained sentences. Participants were three children with CI with a more accurate speech when reading print than when tacting pictures of scenes. They were taught to select pictures of scenes in response to dictated sentences (AB) by matching-to-sample (MTS) and to construct printed sentences in response to dictated sentences (AE) by constructed-response-matching-to-sample (CRMTS). Speech production in response to print (CD) and in response to pictures of scenes (BD) were probed for both trained and untrained sentences, using a multiple baseline design across participants. All participants learned the trained relations, showed emergence of derived relations, and improved speech accuracy when tacting pictures of scenes. They were able to recombine sentence components and tact novel pictures using untrained sentences from the matrix. These results indicate that speech accuracy and generative sentence production can be improved in children with CI from interventions that incorporate EBI and matrix training.

Ensino por múltiplos exemplares e integração de comportamentos de ouvinte e falante com unidades sintáticas substantivo-adjetivo em crianças com DENA e IC

“…Several researches have investigated ways to promote the learning of listening and speaking with units larger than words, in children with CI (21,22) . Some studies have established these verbal abilities with sentences by means of equivalence based instruction (between stimuli dictated, textual and pictures) (23) , while others systematically taught listener's tasks with echoic (21) .…”

“…These findings aggregate a wider literature that demonstrates the effects of teaching conditions over the integration between verbal repertoire and the acquisition of tact accuracy in children with CI, from words to longer units of the language. Some studies showed that teaching based on equivalence relations (23) could promote the integration of verbal abilities and accurate tact, from words (27) up to sentences (22) . These children initially had a controlled speech by textual stimuli (reading) and, after the teaching, this accurate speech started to occur also in response to the picture (tact) due to the control extension of the textual stimuli for the picture.…”

Learning Pseudowords Through Shared Storybook Reading And Auditory-Visual Pairing

“…Behavior analysts have developed several explicit vocabulary teaching procedures for children with different developmental profiles (e.g., deaf, autistic or intellectually disabled children), mainly involving equivalence-based interventions (EBI) (e.g., Langsdorff, Domeniconi, Schmidt, Gomes, & de Souza, 2017;Neves, Almeida-Verdu, Assis, Silva, & Moret, 2018) or multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) (e.g., Merlin, Almeida-Verdu, Neves, Silva, & Moret, 2019). These "instructional packages" include teaching receptive and expressive verbal repertoires through tasks such as matching-to-sample, echoic teaching, or auditory-visual pairing.…”

Adquisición de la precisión del habla de oraciones en niños con implante coclear

“…As condições de ensino e as estratégias terapêuticas podem promover o desenvolvimento da linguagem oral e acelerar o alcance da precisão da fala por crianças com IC (Boothroyd, 2007;Pomaville & Kladopoulos, 2013;Tobey et al, 2003). Neste escopo, estudos de interface entre Fonoaudiologia e Análise do Comportamento têm investigado sob quais condições a precisão da fala seria obtida, especialmente em tarefas de nomeação de figuras envolvendo palavras (Almeida-Verdu et al, 2012;Almeida-Verdu & Gomes, 2017;Anastácio-Pessan et al, 2015;Lucchesi et al, 2015), sentenças (Golfeto & de Souza, 2015;Neves et al, 2018;Silva et al, 2017) e pequenos textos (Rique et al, 2017).…”

“…O EBI aumentou a precisão da fala de sentenças em crianças com IC (Neves et al, 2018;Silva et al, 2017), mas não há um registro sobre as mudanças sistemáticas na precisão da fala dessas sentenças. O presente estudo visou investigar, ponto-a-ponto e por fonemas, a aquisição da precisão da fala diante das figuras de cenas, ao longo do procedimento.…”