Relational Responding: Testing, Training, and Sequencing Effects Among Children With Autism and Typically Developing Children

Relational Frame Theory (RFT) proposes that derived relational responding is crucial to the development of verbal behavior. According to RFT, typically developing children acquire the ability to derive relations through natural language interactions. In contrast, children with autism often do not acquire these skills as readily and require interventions to target their development. Limited research has examined the optimal training context for establishing the core relational skills, such as the sequence in which the relations might be optimally trained. The current research comprised 3 studies to investigate the emergence of specific relational responding repertoires in typically developing children and children with autism. The results demonstrate that the typically developing children had a fluent repertoire of these relational skills, while those with autism demonstrated significant deficits. The results shed some light on the possible role of training sequence.