Analysis of Verbal Behavior最新文献

This study tested for the emergence of listener discriminations and intraverbal vocal responses following tact training with four autistic children. All participants were trained to tact the name and the favorite food of two contrived cartoon monsters in the presence of a picture of the monster (e.g., "What is the name of this monster?" - "Max" and "What food does the monster eat?" - "Sweets") to evaluate the effects of emergent listener discriminations and emergent intraverbal vocal responses. Once criterion was met on the tact training, participants were tested for emergent listener discriminations (e.g., "Who eats sweets?" And "Who is Max?") and emergent intraverbal vocal responses (e.g., "What food does Max eat?" - "Sweets" and "Who eats sweets?" - "Max" in the absence of the picture). After training, all four participants engaged in emergent listener responding but only one participant engaged in emergent intraverbal responding. Multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) was used to teach those who could not engage in emergent intraverbal responding, and it was demonstrated to be effective. These findings are educationally significant because efficiency of instruction is important to maximize instructional impact, and to reduce the time and resource-intensive nature of behavior-analytic programming.

Teaching an infant manual signs is beneficial as it promotes early communication, improves socialization, and can functionally replace behaviors such as crying and whining. Improving early communication also may reduce the probability of an infant engaging in dangerous behavior, like unsafe climbing. The purpose of this study was to extend Thompson et al. (Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis 40:15-23, 2007) by teaching an 8-month-old infant, who was noted to display developmental delays, to sign for "help" when preferred items were inaccessible. Similar to Thompson et al., delayed prompting and differential reinforcement was efficacious in teaching the infant to sign for "help," and the skill generalized to situations that were previously associated with unsafe climbing. However, undesirable generalization of signs for "help" when the infant could independently access the items was observed. Additional teaching was necessary to ensure signing for "help" occurred under appropriate antecedent control.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40616-023-00198-9.

Procedural fidelity refers to the degree to which procedures for an assessment or intervention (i.e., independent variables) are implemented consistent with the prescribed protocols. Procedural fidelity is an important factor in demonstrating the internal validity of an experiment and clinical treatments. Previous reviews evaluating the inclusion of procedural fidelity in published empirical articles demonstrated underreporting of procedural fidelity procedures and measures within specific journals. We conducted a systematic review of The Analysis of Verbal Behavior (TAVB) to evaluate the trends in procedural fidelity reporting from 2007 to 2021. Of the 253 articles published in TAVB during the reporting period, 144 of the articles (168 studies) met inclusionary criteria for further analysis. Our results showed that 54% of studies reported procedural fidelity data, which is slightly higher than previous reviews. In comparison, interobserver-agreement data were reported for a high percentage of studies reviewed (i.e., 93%). Further discussion of results and applied research implications are included.