TEACHING SENTENCE READING AND RETELLING AND ANSWERING COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS IN A CHILD WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER

Abstract

Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) frequently show difficulties in the acquisition of multiple repertoires, including verbal behavior. One type of verbal operant behavior is the intraverbal. It involves the emission of a verbal response under the control of a verbal discriminative stimulus, without point-to-point correspondence between them, and the response is maintained by a generalized conditioned reinforcer. This study focused on narrative retelling, which is a skill that comprises intraverbal chains. It is also discussed in the literature that the teaching of this repertoire may improve gains in text comprehension, which also involves the emission of intraverbals, that is, answering questions. Regarding this skill, previous research investigated procedures that may produce the emergence of answering comprehension questions referred as complex ABC intraverbals (related to the stimulus equivalence paradigm) in typically developing children. In general, they were exposed to cycles in which they first read short texts/sentences relating information on three different stimuli (A, B, and C), Thereafter, the children answered several questions representing all possible complex intraverbal relations among the three stimuli from the sentences. Some learners demonstrated the emergence of all complex relations, and further investigations were carried out with the teaching of simpler intraverbal relations of the type of exemplars and categories before the cycles of reading sentences – probing complex ABC intraverbals. Data indicated that more learners showed the emergence of all, or nearly all, complex relations. The present study comprised two systematic replication experiments, with the inclusion of a child with ASD as participant. Both also involved the teaching of sentence reading and retelling through script fading, to analyze the effects of narrative production on the possible emergence of complex intraverbals. In Experiment 1, cycles of teaching sentence reading and retelling – probing ABC intraverbals were administered. As a result, all possible complex relations emerged.  Experiment 2 involved the teaching of simpler intraverbal relations of the type of exemplars and categories before the cycles of teaching sentence reading and retelling – probing ABC intraverbals. All possible complex intraverbal relations also emerged. Data were discussed in the sense that, although positive, it is not clear whether the teaching of sentence retelling and simpler intraverbal relations facilitated the establishment of the complex intraverbals. It is possible that reading the sentences was sufficient. The limitations of the research were presented and discussed, as well as recommendations for future investigations that may more clearly isolate the effects of each manipulated independent variable. Anyway, the current study extended previous investigations by showing that complex intraverbal relations of the ABC type may also be established in a learner diagnosed with ASD.

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