The acquisition and generalization of compound sentence structure in an autistic child

Abstract

A 6-year-old autistic boy, whose language consisted primarily of two-word phrases, was taught to describe verbally a standard set of training pictures using both simple and compound sentences. Training procedures included imitative prompts, differential reinforcement, and time-out. Procbe trials presenting a set of novel stimuli were used to examine the extent of stimulus generalization for both sentence types in the experimental setting and it was reported that the child used simple and compound sentences spontaneously in a classroom setting at the end of the training period.