Teaching multiply-controlled tacting to children with autism

Abstract

Responding accurately to questions is a fundamental skill, currently under researched in the applied field. The present paper reports the results of a multiple-baseline design across stimulus sets to establish multiply controlled tacting to verbal (“What is it?” “What does it say?” “What color?” “What number?”) and nonverbal visual stimuli (colored objects, animals, and numbers). Two preschool children with autism were taught first to echo, then to tact, using matched autoclitic frames (e.g., “It’s a spoon,” “It’s a cat,” “It says meow,” “Color red,” “Number three”) to the verbal antecedent to establish generalized responding under multiple control. Following intervention, responding of both children generalized to novel members of the stimulus classes, and for one child, to a novel stimulus class. Question discrimination skills thus developed as a generalized response class under multiple sources of control, irrespective of the particular stimuli.