Stimulus equivalence and emergence of intraverbals.
Many of the children I see doing “traditional” EIBI with a strong focus on Discrete Trial Teaching (DTT) develop good language skills, but several of the children lack the flexibility in use of language and many of these children still struggle to acquire new verbal topographies. This may be due to insufficient transfer and generalization training, but it also may be due to the training-procedure. Specially the use of predefined stimulus materiel and lack of reversal training.
So I have been reading up on intraverbal training and stimulus equivalence, specially the emergence of novel intraverbals. Pérez-Gonzáles and colleagues published an article describing three experiments on emergence of novel intraverbals in The Psychological Record in 2008. The study is done with normally-developed children and show the possibility to rationalize training and get novel intraverbals in relations that “goes with”. Of course these findings need to be replicated, and it somebody should compare this results to how children with ASD will respond.
Petursdottir et al (2008) did a study on teaching categorization skills, also with typically developing children. But as the authors state, it´s needed more research on this. It would make a great impact on EIBI if the field of stimulus equivalence could contribute to design more efficient training procedures to teach categorization.
Much of the research done is concerned with the relation “goes with” or , simarility but research needs to be done on other relations. It´s nice to see that there are published studies on other relations, and with other populations. Pérez-Gonzáles et al, did publish in 2007 a study on antonyms with children with ASD. This study shows some possibilities, but more work has to be done here also, but it´s a great study pointing out many research ideas for other professionals.
Based on this literature it would be great to do some work comparing the responding of children with ASD and normally developed children, and on stimulus relations, or relational frames, like comparison, analogical etc.
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