We assessed whether novel praise statements could be used to (a) maintain and increase responses with existing reinforcement histories and (b) teach a previously untaught response among children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder across two experiments. During response-stimulus pairing, two responses resulted in preferred edibles but only one…

This study examined if listener behavior and responding by exclusion would emerge after training 3 participants with autism to tact stimuli. Tacts for 2 of 3 stimuli were directly trained using discrete trial training methodology and were followed by an auditory-visual discrimination probe in which auditory-visual discrimination by naming (i.e.,…

Mastery criteria can be applied to individual targets or stimuli organized into sets. Wong et al. (2021) and Wong and Fienup (2022) found that participants who received special education services learned sight words more rapidly when an individual target mastery criterion was applied. The current study replicated and extended these findings across…

An important communication skill for children with autism is answering multiple questions about visual stimuli (e.g., "What is it?" "What color is it?"). We targeted answering "What number?" and "What shape?" in the presence of numbers inside shapes, and "What is it?" and "What color?" in…

Differential reinforcement procedures may promote unprompted correct responding, resulting in a quicker transfer of stimulus control than nondifferential reinforcement. Recent studies that have compared reinforcement arrangements have found that the most effective arrangement may differ across participants. The current study conducted an…

The purpose of the study was to evaluate a procedure to generate derived categorical responding by three children with disabilities and to promote the emergence of untrained intraverbal categorical responses. In the study, three 4-member equivalence classes including three stimuli (A, B, and C) and a category name (D) for each class were trained…

The present study evaluated the efficacy of a set of procedures for bringing tact extensions of abstract tactile properties under stimulus control. Two participants with disabilities who communicated via a picture-based communication system received reinforcement for tacts of tactile properties of four wet/dry and four hard/soft stimuli. Test…

We extended past observational learning research by incorporating stimuli already known to participants into training. We used a multiple-baseline design across three participants to determine the effects of discrimination training on the discrimination of consequences applied to modeled responses using both known and unknown pictures. During…

The go/no-go with compound stimuli is an alternative to matching-to-sample to produce conditional and emergent relations in adults. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of this procedure with two children diagnosed with autism. We trained and tested participants to respond to conditional relations among arbitrary stimuli using…

Responding to stimuli as same and different can be considered a critical component of a variety of language and academic repertoires. Whereas responding to "sameness" and generalized identity matching (i.e., coordination) have been studied extensively, there appears to be a significant gap in behavior analytic research and educational…

The purpose of the current study was to examine the effects of mand, tact, and native-to-foreign (NFI) and foreign-to-native (FNI) intraverbal training on the acquisition of a foreign language. We used a multiple-baseline design across participants with an embedded adapted alternating treatments design to compare the effects of mand training, tact…

Many individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) display stimulus overselectivity, wherein a subset of relevant components in a compound stimulus controls responding, which impairs discrimination learning. The original experimental research on stimulus overselectivity in ASD was conducted several decades ago; however, interventions for…

Reciprocal conversations, instructional activities, and other social interactions are replete with multiply controlled intraverbals, examples of which have been conceptualized in terms of conditional discriminations. Although the acquisition of conditional discriminations has been examined extensively in the behavior-analytic literature, little…

We taught 4 participants with autism to discriminate between the reinforced and nonreinforced responses of an adult model and evaluated the effectiveness of this intervention using a multiple baseline design. During baseline, participants were simply exposed to adult models' correct and incorrect responses and the respective consequences of each.…

Successful conversation requires that the speaker's behavior is sensitive to nonvocal listener responses. We observed children with autism spectrum disorder during conversation probes in which a listener periodically displayed nonvocal cues that she was uninterested in the conversation. We used behavioral skills training to teach conversation…