In a recent published study, Murphy and Barnes-Holmes, showed successfully establishing derived mands in children with autism in the relation of more-less. This study is published in Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis.
This is an important contribution to research on language teaching for children with autism. To effectively establish a flexible mand repertoire in children with autism, an approach that needs to directly train every mand that the child requires will not be sufficient. So by developing procedures to teach derived transfer would improve the behavior analytic approach to teach children with autism further.
In this study the researcher managed to establish derived manding with three, e.g four, children diagnosed with autism. And they arranged control conditions that support their findings. Showing that teaching derived manding through conditional discrimination are possible with children with autism.
I have just startet up perspective-taking teaching for a new child with autism using the protocol developed by McHugh, Barnes-Holmes and Barnes-Holmes as described in the book Derived Relational Responding Applications for Learners with Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities: A Progressive Guide to Change (Professional)
. This protocol is based on Relational Frame Theory and derived relational responding.
I have used this protocol with other children with autism, and the results are really promising, both on the data collected through the teaching sessions, test for Theory of Mind and the clinical picture. But as I experienced today and have on other occasions, it´s a difficult procedure to implement.
Specially when the teaching of several reversed relations start, it gets difficult for the trainers to present the contextual cues and discriminative stimulus in a constant and clear manner. Of course it helps to have prepared the tasks well in advance, but as some children lear fast it can be difficult to hold on.
Anyone have similar experience, and what have you done to ease the effort?
I´m these days implementing new procedures on teaching categorization skills to the children receiving EIBI. In the planning and writing of procedures, I´m wondering what to try out now. The one thing that is certain is that the new procedures will build on knowledge and recent research on derived stimulus relations.
The first alternative is to implement procedure based on recommendations by Miguel and Petursdottir where the focus is to teach tacting og stimulus name and multiple tacting, both stimulus name and category name or label. There are several reasons to try this.
But, it would be interesting to try out a procedure including contextual cues as “contains”, “is a member of” in the teaching procedure. This may be harder to establish, but the generativity would probably be much greater.
Maybe I´ll end up trying out both. Anyone who have experience in any of these procedures?
After some time with some difficulties getting the book Derived Relational Responding Applications for Learners with Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities: A Progressive Guide to Change, by Rehfeldt and Barnes-Holmes. I finally got it today.
I have really been looking forward to reading this book, and I have to say; I´m really impressed. It´s even better than I expected! I have been interested in Relational Frame Theory and derived relational responding for some time, especially applied to young learners with autism. So I´m been reading a lot of great litterature. But the great thing about this book is the applied focus in it.
Based on many of the chapters in the book, you can apply effective teaching for young learners. I find this book a great, and needed, contribution to the field of derived relational responding. I really hope that this way of spread the procedures and rationales behind teaching based on derived relational responding, will lead to the needed empirical work this theory really needs.
Hope more practitioners apply these procedures, and contribute with data to support or, of course, not supporting this theory.
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.