Manding for preferred items and activities is a critical skill for young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, little research has evaluated procedures to teach children with ASD to mand with their peers. This study evaluated the effects of a teaching package involving least-to-most prompting to increase peer-directed vocal…

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…

This study examined the functional independence of mand and tact operants in normally developing children and evaluated the role of S[superscript D]s in demonstrating emergent responding. In Experiment 1, 4 children aged 4 to 5 years, were trained to mand or tact using left/right relations, then were tested for the emergence of the untaught…

We evaluated the effects of reinforcing multiple manding topographies during functional communication training (FCT) to decrease problem behavior for three preschool-age children. During Phase 1, a functional analysis identified conditions that maintained problem behavior for each child. During Phase 2, the children's parents taught them to…

The phenomenon identified as naming is a key stage of language function that is missing in many children with autism and other language delay diagnoses. We identified four children with autism, who, prior to the implementation of this experiment, did not have the naming repertoire (either speaker to listener or listener to speaker) and who had no…

The conceptual basis for many effective language-training programs are based on Skinner's (1957) analysis of verbal behavior. Skinner described several elementary verbal operants including mands, tacts, intraverbals, and echoics. According to Skinner, responses that are the same topography may actually be functionally independent. Previous…

Speaker immersion is a tactic that uses multiple establishing operations to increase speaker behavior for individuals with limited mand and tact repertoires. The purpose of this paper was to evaluate the effects of speaker immersion on the number of independent mands, tacts, and autoclitics emitted by young children with verbal delays. In the…

We tested the effect of multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) on acquisition of joint spelling responses, vocal to written and vice versa, for three sets of five words by four kindergarteners with language delays using a delayed multiple probe design. First, students were taught to spell Set 1 as either vocal or written responses (two vocal and two…