Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have qualitative impairments in social interaction and often prefer food or tangible reinforcement to social reinforcement. Thus, therapists who work with children with ASD often use food or tangible items as reinforcers to increase appropriate behaviors or decrease problem behaviors. The goal of the…

A primary goal of behavioral interventions is to reduce dangerous or inappropriate behavior and to generalize treatment effects across various settings. However, there is a lack of research evaluating generalization of treatment effects while individuals with functionally equivalent problem behavior interact with each other. For the current study,…

Recently, there has been a proliferation of research on the functional independence of two of Skinner's (1957) verbal operants, the mand, and the tact. This research has produced highly variable results. In this article, we provide a critical review of the literature on mand-tact independence, a literature that has implications for both theory and…

The purpose of the present study was to assess whether intraverbal behavior, in the form of answers to questions, emerges as a result of listener training for five children diagnosed with autism. Listener responses were targeted and taught using prompting and differential reinforcement. Following successful acquisition of listener responses, the…

Learning Skinner's (1957) verbal behavior taxonomy requires extensive study and practice. Thus, novel classroom exercises might serve this goal. The present manuscript describes a classroom exercise in which two students analyzed Lady Gaga's song "Applause" in terms of its metaphorical arrangements. Through the exercise, students…

Five reinforcing activities were presented to and interrupted for two participants with autism. An errorless teaching procedure was then introduced with two similar activities prompting the participants to request information saying "How?" in order to resume the activity. The dependent variable included both the cumulative number of…

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…

The purpose of the current paper is to describe the impact of applied behaviour analysis on language treatment for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) diagnoses. Specifically, this paper will describe Skinner's theory of verbal behaviour and its contributions to evidence-based treatments for communication deficits among individuals with…

In Experiment 1, I conducted a functional analysis of student rate of learning with and without a peer-yoked contingency for 12 students in Kindergarten through 2nd grade in order to determine if they had conditioned reinforcement for collaboration. Using an ABAB reversal design, I compared rate of learning as measured by learn units to criterion…

Participants first became familiar with an image showing moderate symptoms of the skin cancer melanoma. In a generalization test, they indicated whether images showing more and less pronounced symptoms were "like the original." Some groups (cancer context) were told that the images depicted melanoma and that the disease is deadly unless…

This study aimed to teach individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and limited vocal speech to emit target vocalizations while using a speech-generating device (SGD). Of the 4 participants, 3 began emitting vocal word approximations with SGD responses after vocal instructional methods (delays, differential reinforcement, prompting) were…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have difficulty inferring the private events of others, including private verbal behavior (e.g., thoughts), private emotional responses, and private establishing operations, often referred to as "perspective taking" by the general psychology community. Children with ASD also have…

This study aimed at investigating the similarities and differences between Vygotsky's perspectives on child language development with nativism and behaviorism. Proposing the idea of the Zone of Proximal Development, Vygotsky emphasized the role of collaborative interaction, scaffolding, and guided participation in language learning. Nativists, on…

An adapted alternating treatments design was used to compare the efficacy of echoic and textual prompts to teach three students with autism (ages 8-15) to ask questions related to two pre-selected topics of conversation. Participants were first required to answer questions related to the topics to determine whether accurate responses were within…

Based on Skinner's classification of verbal behavior, the mand is the first and most advantageous verbal operant to develop. Deficits in vocal mand repertoires are common in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and can lead to decreased social interaction and increased problem behavior. The present investigation compared the effects of…