Emergent Intraverbal and Reverse Intraverbal Behavior Following Listener Training in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Inger Karin Almås,Svein Eikeseth,Dean P Smith,Sigmund Eldevik

doi:10.1007/s40616-021-00164-3

Inger Karin Almås, Svein Eikeseth + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s40616-021-00164-3

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Abstract

We evaluated whether intraverbal and reverse intraverbal behavior emerged following listener training in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Six participants were each taught three sets of three “when?” questions in listener training. A multiple baseline design across behaviors (stimulus sets) was used to assess the effects of listener training. Results showed that intraverbal behavior emerged following listener training for five out of six participants. One participant received additional listener training and intraverbal training before intraverbal behavior emerged. Furthermore, reverse intraverbal responding occurred across all three sets of questions for three of the six participants. Establishing listener behavior may be a pathway for emergent intraverbal and reverse intraverbal responding in children with ASD. Future research could examine what skill repertoire may facilitate such transfer.

Highlights

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often show deficits in acquiring intraverbal behavior (Sundberg & Sundberg, 2011), defined as verbal responses that do not share point-to-point correspondence with their verbal antecedents (Skinner, 1957; Sundberg, 2016)
Smith et al (2016) examined the effectiveness of listener training on emergent intraverbal behavior in five participants with ASD, who already were able to tact the stimuli involved in the listener training
Correct intraverbal responding to set 1 questions rose to 100% for 7 of 8 sessions, to 100% for 6 of 9 sessions for set 2, and to 100% for all 6 sessions for set 3

Summary

Introduction

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often show deficits in acquiring intraverbal behavior (Sundberg & Sundberg, 2011), defined as verbal responses that do not share point-to-point correspondence with their verbal antecedents (Skinner, 1957; Sundberg, 2016). Smith et al (2016) examined the effectiveness of listener training on emergent intraverbal behavior in five participants with ASD, who already were able to tact the stimuli involved in the listener training. Previous studies have implemented listener training and probed for the emergence of reverse intraverbals in typically developing children (e.g., Cortez et al, 2020; Petursdottir et al, 2008b), only three studies have examined the emergence of reverse intraverbal responding in children with ASD (Allan et al, 2015; Dickes & Kodak, 2015; Thakore & Petursdottir, 2021). Teaching with tact prompts produced only small increases in intraverbal responding, whereas the addition of fluency training quickly produced criterion-level performance Both participants demonstrated generalization to untrained questions including some reverse intraverbals

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