Young children with autism may fail to mand using a range of frames (e.g., "I want," "May I have," "Please give me"). We examined the effects of simultaneous script training and script fading on acquisition and maintenance of varied mand frames with six preschool children with autism. For participants who did not…

Research on joint control has focused on mediational responses, in which simultaneous stimulus control from two sources leads to the emission of a single response, such as choosing a comparison stimulus in delayed matching-to-sample. Most recent studies of joint control examined the role of verbal mediators (i.e., rehearsal) in evoking accurate…

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…

Three studies investigated the effects of pedagogical cues to an artist's referential intention on 2- and 2.5-year-old children's understanding of drawings in a matching task without verbal labels support. Results showed that pedagogical cues, the combination of the artist's eye gaze while she was creating the drawings (nonlinguistic cues), and…

Effective intraverbal responding often requires control by multiple elements of a verbal stimulus. The purpose of this study was to examine the emergence of such intraverbal relations following tact instruction with compound stimuli and to analyze any resulting error patterns. Participants were seven typically developing children between 3 and…

A fundamental question in language acquisition research is whether young children have abstract grammatical representations. We tested this question experimentally. French-learning 30-month-olds were first taught novel word-object pairs in the context of a gender-marked determiner (e.g., un[subscript MASC]ravole "a ravole"). Test trials…

This study aimed to better understand how metacognitive skills develop in young children aged 5 to 7 years. In particular, we addressed whether developmental changes reflect quantitative or qualitative improvements, and how metacognitive skills change with age and task-specific ability. Previous research into the development of metacognitive…

Although, recent reviews and outcome research support empirical evidence for Early Intensive Behavior Intervention in University and community settings, research has also indicated that not all intensive behavioral service provisions are equally effective. Therefore, it was necessary to comprehend key variables that are common to empirically…

This study highlights the complex reading processes of two primary grade struggling readers. It provides a more complete picture of the readers' use of all parts of a text, verbal and visual, to construct meaning during reading. The oral reading data show that students used various linguistic strategies to read words, and the eye-tracking data…

This study sought to examine the effects of training mands on the emergence of tacts with the same response forms. Results indicated that training adjective sets as mands resulted in the emergence of adjective sets as tacts under modified, but not standard, antecedent conditions. The findings suggested that the apparent functional independence of…

We investigated the extent to which mands for information taught using structured teaching trials (i.e., verbal discriminative stimulus, verbal prompts, and programmed consequences) while contriving the establishing operations to young children with autism generalized to novel stimuli and settings. Three students with autism participated in this…

The author examined the transfer of stimulus control from instructor assistance to verbal cues and pictorial cues. The intent was to determine whether it is easier to transfer stimulus control to one form of cue or the other. No studies have conducted such comparisons to date; however, literature exists to suggest that visual cues may be…

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…

The functions of an American Sign Language response were experimentally evaluated with a young boy diagnosed with autism. A functional analysis procedure based on that reported by Lerman et al. (2005) was used to evaluate whether the target sign response would occur under mand, tact, mimetic, or control conditions. The target sign was observed…

Acquisition of verbal behavior is a major goal of interventions for children with developmental disabilities. We evaluated the effectiveness of manipulation of an establishing operation for functional discriminated mands. Four individuals with developmental disabilities participated in a training procedure designed to teach two separate mands for…