Analysis of Verbal Behavior最新文献

Differences in prosody behavior between individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their typically developing peers have been considered a central feature of ASD since the earliest clinical descriptions of the disorder (e.g., Kanner, 1943/1973). Prosody includes pitch and volume among other dimensions of vocal-verbal behavior that discriminate responses of the listener; thus, people with ASD whose prosody has confusing or off-putting effects may have fewer social opportunities at work, at school, or in the community. The purpose of this review is to examine the state of the literature intervening on prosody with individuals with ASD and to provide recommendations for researchers who are interested in contributing to the scientific understanding of prosody.

The purposes of this study were to evaluate the effects of an auditory-distractor stimulus and vocal-blocking task on performance on a math task and measures of overt verbal operants. College students served as participants, and they were instructed to solve an arithmetic problem while continuously emitting overt verbal behavior. The overt verbal behavior consisted of either talking aloud while solving the problem or reciting the alphabet. A third condition consisted of playing an auditory-distractor file containing the alphabet during the response interval while participants talked aloud. Data were collected on response accuracy, latency to respond, and frequency of echoic and self-echoic responses emitted during the response interval. The vocal-blocking task significantly affected performance on the math task when visual stimuli were absent. The decrease in performance coincided with significant decreases in participants' mean frequency of echoic and self-echoic responses. In sum, correctly responding to an arithmetic problem was significantly affected by the vocal-blocking task, indicating support for the necessity of verbal mediation during problem solving.

In 1959, Jack Michael and his PhD student Ted Ayllon published "The Psychiatric Nurse as a Behavioral Engineer" (Ayllon & Michael, 1959). That study was Ayllon's doctoral dissertation and was the first empirical demonstration of how the principles of behavior (e.g., reinforcement, extinction, satiation) could be applied to solve clinical problems. That research was the beginning of what would soon be called "behavior modification," and later, "applied behavior analysis." Jack's foundational contributions to behavior analysis continued for 5 decades. In recognition of his life's work, his former students and close associates John Mabry, Grayson Osborne, Jon Bailey, Mark Sundberg, and J. Vincent Carbone offer tributes to Jack. These tributes tell the story of Jack's early teaching career, his students, his work, and how he inspired others to become behavior analysts. Six more tributes will appear in the fall issue of The Analysis of Verbal Behavior and will provide insight into Jack's work and other activities in the later part of his career. Those tributes will be from Jack's former students and close associates Hank Schlinger, Dave Palmer, Carl Sundberg, John and Barb Esch, Anna Petursdottir, and Caio Miguel.

Since Skinner's conceptualization of the mand, applied behavior analysis researchers have used the concept to develop stimulus control transfer procedures effective for addressing manding deficits. More recently, researchers have explored the clinical utility of reinforcing mand variability during mand training and functional communication training. However, limitations in the conceptual analysis of mand variability may have limited the kinds of questions addressed in this research and our understanding of the findings. The current article reconceptualizes mand variability as consisting of eight distinct dimensions and provides operational definitions of the dimensions that may be useful for more precisely characterizing the effects of reinforcement on mand variability in future research. The article concludes with a brief discussion of potential clinical and research implications.