Using Stimulus-Stimulus Pairing and Direct Reinforcement to Teach Vocal Verbal Behavior to Young Children With Autism

In this study the effect of a stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure was used as part of a clinical investigation to increase vocalizations for two young children diagnosed with autism. This procedure involved pairing a vocal sound with a preferred stimulus (e.g., toy) to condition automatic reinforcement. In addition, this study assessed the effects of a direct reinforcement procedure to bring a vocalization under echoic control following the pairing procedure for 1 of the participants. The results showed the pairing procedure was used successfully to increase a vocalization for one of the participants, and the vocalization was brought under echoic control.     

The Effects of a Stimulus-Stimulus Pairing Procedure on the Unprompted Vocalizations of a Young Child Diagnosed with Autism

The current study evaluated the effects of a stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure intended to increase spontaneous vocalizations of a young child diagnosed with autism. A multiple-baseline design across two target phonemes was used to evaluate the effects of the pairing procedure on the frequency of phonemes uttered by the participant. Data were collected during presession, postsession, and follow-up periods across three conditions: Baseline, Control, and Pairing. During the Pairing conditions, a target phoneme was repeatedly vocalized by the experimenter and was systematically paired with preferred stimuli. Results from postsession observations following the pairing condition evidenced no increase in the target sounds. Practical and theoretical implications of the results are discussed.     

Stimulus-Stimulus Pairing and Subsequent Mand Acquisition of Children with Various Levels of Verbal Repertoires

Effects of a stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure on the subsequent acquisition of mand operants were investigated. An attempt was made to shape novel sounds that emerged through the pairing procedure into a mand. Six children, aged two to five years, with moderate to severe language and communication delays, participated. Two conditions were used following the pairing condition: postpairing and direct reinforcement. The emergence of mands was compared across these conditions. An additional analysis was made of the relation between participants'' baseline verbal repertoires and the effects of the pairing and the emergence of mands. Results indicate the possibility of stimulus control from a stimulus-stimulus pairing to mand as shown in two of the participants who had demonstrated high rates of vocal play and low to no verbal repertoire prior to this study. Target vocal sounds during postpairing and direct reinforcement condition remained at zero to low levels for participants with high verbal repertoire and little vocal play, warranting future studies on relations between the pre-existing verbal repertoire and the effectiveness of stimulus-stimulus pairing.     

Evaluating Stimulus-Stimulus Pairing and Direct Reinforcement in the Establishment of an Echoic Repertoire of Children Diagnosed with Autism

Many children with autism do not imitate adult vocalizations, an important skill in learning to talk. Pairing adult vocalizations with preferred stimuli has been shown to increase free-operant vocalizations but effects are temporary; thus, direct reinforcement may be necessary to establish durable vocal behaviors. In Experiment 1, directly reinforced echoic responses did not increase following stimulus-stimulus pairings in three children with autism. Similarly, pairings did not increase free-operant vocalizations in Experiment 2, a replication of Miguel et al. (2002). Experiment 3 demonstrated that shaping increased vowel frequency for one participant. Results suggest that variables are yet to be delineated that influence effectiveness of a stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure on vocalization frequency and acquisition of a verbal operant following such pairings.     

Assessing the Effects of Observational Conditioning and Response-Contingent Pairing on the Vocalizations of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often display impairments in communication, such as limited echoic behavior, few vocal-verbal responses, and a lack of functional communication. One potential way to foster the acquisition of vocal responses in individuals with disabilities is by conditioning vocalizations as reinforcers. Conditioning procedures include stimulus–stimulus pairing, response-contingent pairing (RCP), operant discrimination training, and observational conditioning (OC). However, previous research has not evaluated whether OC can be used to condition vocalizations as reinforcers. The current study assessed whether two conditioning procedures, RCP and OC, were effective in conditioning vocalizations as a reinforcer and also evaluated their effect on the rate of vocalizations. Participants included three children with ASD, ages 5–10 years old. During the conditioning phase, rates of vocalizations during the RCP and OC conditions and a control condition were compared within an adapted alternating-treatments design. Reinforcer assessments were completed in a multielement design, pre- and postconditioning, to assess whether the target vocalizations acquired reinforcing properties. A conditioning effect and an increase in the rate of vocalizations were observed for two of the three participants; however, the conditioning effect was minor for one participant. Overall, the results of this study indicate both the RCP and OC procedures may be beneficial in increasing vocalizations for some children and could be incorporated into clinical programs and further explored in future research.     

Emergent Tact Control Following Stimulus Pairing: Comparison of Procedural Variations

We examined emergent tact control following stimulus pairing, using 2 different stimulus presentation arrangements. In the word-first condition, presentation of the auditory stimulus preceded the visual stimulus, and in the image-first condition, the visual stimulus preceded the auditory stimulus. Eight children (2–5 years old) participated. In Experiment 1, 4 children were exposed to 3 sessions in each condition with a new set of stimuli in each session. In Experiment 2, 2 of the same children received repeated exposure to the same stimulus sets. Experiment 3, with new participants, was identical to Experiment 1, except visual and auditory stimuli overlapped during the presentation. Postsession probes documented emergent stimulus control over 1 or more vocal responses for 7 of the 8 participants. Participants were more likely to make echoic responses with the visual stimulus present in the word-first condition; however, emergent tact control was unaffected by the order of the stimulus presentation. Additional research is needed on stimulus-pairing procedures and on the role of echoic responding in emergent tact control.     

Analyzing Stimulus-Stimulus Pairing Effects on Preferences for Speech Sounds

Several studies have demonstrated effects of stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP) on children's vocalizations, but numerous treatment failures have also been reported. The present study attempted to isolate procedural variables related to failures of SSP to condition speech sounds as reinforcers. Three boys diagnosed with autism-spectrum disorders participated. Phase 1 was designed to assess SSP effects on production of auditory stimuli via button pressing. When SSP failed to produce a preference for the target stimulus, we instituted a series of procedural manipulations intended to address potential reasons for failure. One participant preferred the target stimulus when given the opportunity to select preferred items for pairing prior to each session, but a subsequent reversal attempt produced ambiguous results. Two participants showed no consistent preference in Phase 1 and underwent a within-session reinforcer evaluation in Phase 2, in which alternative controlling variables were demonstrated by delivering preferred stimuli contingent on button pressing.     

The Effects of Multiple-Tact and Receptive-Discrimination Training on the Acquisition of Intraverbal Behavior

The purpose of this study was to determine whether multiple-tact training and receptive-discrimination training could be used to teach thematically related vocal intraverbals to typically developing preschool children. Multiple-tact training involved teaching a child to name both the item and the category to which the item belonged. Receptive-discrimination training consisted of teaching a child to select a picture card in the presence of a question from the experimenter regarding the item or its category. When neither of these strategies resulted in substantial increases in intraverbal responses, a typical intraverbal training protocol using tact prompts was implemented. Six typically developing children participated in the study. A multiple-baseline design across word categories was used to evaluate the effects of the three training procedures. Results indicated that both multiple-tact and receptive-discrimination training had minimal effects on the strength of the intraverbal repertoire, whereas direct intraverbal training had a more substantial effect. The results provide some evidence of the functional independence of verbal operants, as well as the independence of listener and speaker repertoires. Receptive-discrimination and multiple-tact training may have facilitated acquisition of intraverbals; however, further research is needed to assess how these repertoires might interact with each other.     

The Effects of a Delay of Noncontingent Reinforcement during a Pairing Procedure in the Development of Stimulus Control of Automatically Reinforced Vocalizations

Children with autism and related disabilities frequently fail to develop echoic repertoires. Among the ways in which treatment approaches vary is the extent to which automatic reinforcement is utilized. The present experiment was designed to test the efficacy of a procedure that incorporates automatic reinforcement and socially mediated reinforcement in the development of an echoic repertoire. The implementation of this treatment package resulted in an increase in the vocal play and echoic behavior for two participants, each of whom had very limited verbal repertoires. The study was conducted as a multiple probe across sounds design. Vocal play for Participant 1 increased from baseline rates as low as .2 per min to 4.5 per min during treatment, and her percent correct echoic behavior increased from 0% to at least 90% on both sounds. Participant 2 showed rapid gains in echoic control on one sound before requiring dismissal from the study. Interobserver agreement on the occurrence of target vocals equaled 100%. The results of this study have implications for which procedures to use in the establishment of echoic, echoic mand, and mand repertoires.     

Emergence of Selective Social Referencing in Infancy

Seven and 10‐month‐old infants were presented with a remote‐controlled toy dog that intermittently barked at 30‐sec intervals as they faced an experimenter who either attended to them (look toward condition) or looked away (look away condition). Seven‐month‐old infants' looking toward the experimenter was significantly greater after the dog barking events compared to before regardless of experimental condition. In contrast, 10‐month‐old infants' looks were significantly greater after the barking events compared to before only when the experimenter was attending to them. These results suggest that by 10 months infants monitor and refer to people in an ambiguous situation depending on their attention toward them. This development is viewed as indexing the emergence of an intentional stance in social referencing by 10 months of age.     

Emotion Regulation Via Maternal Touch

The study of emotion elicitation in the caregiver‐infant dyad has focused almost exclusively on the facial and vocal channels, whereas little attention has been given to the contribution of the tactile channel. This study was undertaken to investigate the effects of touch on infants' emotions. During the time that objects were presented to the dyad, mothers provided tactile stimulation to their 12‐month‐old infants by either (a) tensing their fingers around the infants' abdomen while abruptly inhaling, (b) relaxing their grip around the infants' abdomen, or (c) not providing additional tactile stimulation (control condition). The results revealed that infants in the first condition (a) touched the objects less and waited longer to touch the objects while displaying more negative emotional displays compared to infants in the control condition. However, no apparent differences were found between infants in the second condition (b) and the control condition. The results suggest that infants' emotions may be elicited by specific parameters of touch.     

Nonverbal intimacy,sex, and compliance: A field study

The present study was designed to explore further the effects of nonverbal behaviors and sex on compliance. Male and female subjects who had just found a dime in a phone booth were approached by a male or female experimenter and were asked to return the dime that the experimenter had supposedly just lost. In the Eye Contact condition, the experimenter gazed at the subject as the request was made, whereas in the No-Eye Contact condition he/she did not. In addition, the experimenter lightly touched half of the subjects while making his/her request, but did not touch the other half. Replicating previous findings, it was found that both eye contact (significantly) and touching (marginally) produced increased rates of compliance. Extending prior results, these effects were obtained for male experimenters. Furthermore, a Sex of experimenter times Sex of subject interaction effect was obtained, such that subjects were much more willing to comply with the request of an opposite, rather than same sex experimenter. Questionnaire data suggested that: 1) subjects were aware of the touch, but not of the eye contact variable, and 2) the requesters were perceived as much more attractive when they were of the opposite, rather than the same sex as the subjects.     

Expanding Vocal Requesting Repertoires via Relational Responding in Adults with Severe Developmental Disabilities

The purpose of this project was to demonstrate untrained vocal requests in three adults with severe developmental disabilities. Specifically, we evaluated whether a history of reinforced relational responding would give rise to untrained vocal requests for novel items. Participants were first taught to request preferred items using their category names. They were then taught conditional discriminations between pictures of preferred items that were categorically related. Finally, participants were tested for their abilities to request items that had not been originally presented during request training, using their category names. All participants demonstrated untrained requests, and for some participants, changes in the mand repertoire were accompanied by changes in the tact repertoire. Some participants also showed generalization of skills across settings.     

Why Do Some Toddlers Help A Stranger? Origins of Individual Differences in Prosocial Behavior

This study investigated the influence of emotion on toddlers' prosocial behavior in instrumental helping tasks with an unfamiliar adult. The goals were to examine whether early prosocial behavior was affected by (1) the adult's expressions of sadness (in contrast to a neutral expression) as a cue of need and (2) toddlers' emotion understanding. Thirty‐five 18‐ to 20‐month‐olds participated in eight trials in which an experimenter either indicated need for assistance (experimental condition) or did not (control). In addition, the experimenter expressed either sadness or neutral affect in each trial. Toddlers' emotion understanding was assessed using maternal reports of children's emotion words. The experimenter's emotional expression alone was not associated with prosocial behavior, but toddlers helped more in experimental than control conditions. However, toddlers with larger emotion word vocabularies were marginally more prosocial when the experimenter expressed sadness, and girls provided more assistance than boys in experimental conditions. These findings highlight the complex influences of emotion on early prosocial motivation.     

Stimulus-Stimulus Pairing of Vocalizations: A Systematic Replication

The current study replicated an enhanced stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP) procedure used by Esch et al. (Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis 42: 42–225, 2009) for increasing vocalizations in children with autism. The enhanced SSP procedure consisted of pairing target vocalizations with high-preference items, interspersed target and nontarget trials, an observing response, and the presentation of the vocalizations in “motherese” speech. Results showed substantial increases in target vocalizations above baseline levels and above nontarget vocalizations for two of three participants.     

ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF GUEST REVIEWERS

This study explored 14‐month‐old infants' ability to form novel word‐spatial relation associations. During habituation, infants heard 1 novel word (e.g., teek) while viewing dynamic containment events (i.e., Big Bird placed in a box) and, on other habituation trials, a second novel word (e.g., blick) while viewing dynamic support events (i.e., Big Bird placed on the box). Each novel word was presented in a sentence (e.g., “She's putting Big Bird teek the box”). During the test, infants discriminated an event that maintained the habituation word‐relation pairing from one that presented a switch in this pairing. The results indicate that 14‐month‐olds can learn to form word‐relation associations quickly, requiring only a few minutes of experience with each word‐relation pairing.     

Infant Looking Behavior in Ambiguous Situations: Social Referencing or Attachment Behavior?

Is infant looking behavior in ambiguous situations best described in terms of information seeking (social referencing) or as attachment behavior? Twelve‐month‐old infants were assigned to 1 of 2 conditions (Study 1); each infant's mother provided positive information about an ambiguous toy and an experimenter provided positive information. In Study 2, 12‐month‐old infants were assigned to 1 of 3 conditions: mother provided positive information about the toy, mother was inattentive, or mother provided negative information; the experimenter was inattentive. The infants preferred to look at the experimenter in almost all conditions and they regulated their behavior in accordance with information obtained from the experimenter. None of the studies lends support for an explanation in terms of behaviors deriving from the attachment system, and they raise questions concerning social referencing interpretations of infants' looking behavior. Other alternatives for explaining infant looking behavior in social referencing situations (e.g., associative learning) are discussed.     

Using Transfer Procedures to Teach Tacts to a Child with Autism

This applied study attempted to evaluate a combination of transfer procedures commonly used to teach tacts to children with autism. A receptive to echoic to tact transfer and an echoic to tact transfer procedure were combined during 5-min instructional sessions to teach tacts to a seven-year-old vocal child with autism. A multiple baseline design across three sets of ten tacts was used. Without the teaching procedure, the child acquired no target tacts. With the 5-min teaching procedure implemented first with Set 1 then with Sets 2 and 3, respectively, the child acquired thirty new tacts over sixty teaching sessions. The results have wide application for children with and without autism who need instruction to learn tacts.     

Effects of Contingent Reinforcement of Actions on Infants' Object‐Directed Reaching

The role of contingency learning was examined in 3‐month‐old infants' reaching movements. Infants in the experimental group experienced 9 min of active training during which they could move their arms in a reach‐like fashion to pull and move a mobile. Infants in the control group experienced 9 min of passive training during which they watched a mobile move. Prior to (pre‐training) and following the mobile experience (post‐training), infants in both conditions were given an opportunity to interact with a rattle placed within and out of their reach. Compared with infants in the control condition, infants in the experimental condition produced reach‐like movements more frequently during the mobile experience; they also showed a greater increase in reaching attempts from pre‐ to post‐training assessments with the rattle. These findings show that reinforcement of arm extensions and retractions increases the frequency of infants' reaching behaviors. This result suggests that the reinforcement of components of infants' behaviors may contribute to the successful assembly of these behaviors. This process could help keep infants engaged during the lengthy transition from prereaching to independent reaching.     

Using a Lag Reinforcement Schedule to Increase Phonemic Variability in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Shaping functional vocal language is difficult when an individual has not yet acquired an echoic repertoire and does not emit sufficient phonemes (i.e., speech sounds) for shaping. Few studies have evaluated interventions to increase the frequency and breadth of phonemes. The current study extended Esch, Esch, and Love (2009) by evaluating the effects of a Lag 1 reinforcement schedule on vocal variability and limiting the definition of variability to responses that incorporated a novel phoneme. For 2 of the 3 participants, the cumulative number of novel phonemes, the percentage of trials with variability, and the number of different phonemes emitted per session increased during the Lag 1 intervention phase.