Nesrhtens…..

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.

The allegation that relational flexibility, measured by faster responding on IRAP and smaller difference-scores, predicts higher IQ is put forward by O´Tool and Barnes-Holmes in the latest issue of The Psychological Record.

They base this allegation on research investigating the relationship between responding on IRAP and the intelligence test Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test (K-BIT). This study follow up other research in this field (ex. O´Hara), and support the notion that derived relational responding is important for human cognition and human intelligence.

The most interesting is how it gives an behavior analytic understanding of human intelligence, and therefore possible to design effective and data-based educational intervention targeting intelligence. As this research evolves it should have great impact on education both in general education and special education.

Murphy and Barnes-Holmes has or are doing i research program to investigate the establishing of derived Manding. And in this program they have published another article in The Psychological Record where they establish derived manding for specific amounts.

This article contribute to the important work demonstrating procedures to establish derived manding, and thus derived relational responding, with different populations. This study has participants that are normally developed and language delayed, previous studies has included children with autism.

The article both give evidence for the establishing of derived manding, and also points out how the results could be utilized in practical application. It´s something that makes this article even more interesting to read, and this is an example who more authors should follow!

I´ve been reading the article “The Role of Verbal Behavior, Stimulus Nameability, And Familiarity on the Equivalences of Autistic and Normally Developing Children” published by Jennifer O´Connor, Aoife Rafferty, Dermot Barnes-Holmes and Yvonne Barnes-Holmes in The Psychological Record, 2009 no 59 with great interest as stimulus equivalence, relational frame theory is one of my primary professional interests, and I specially interested in research in this area involving persons with ASD.

This study has investigated the influence of verbal capabilities of participants on the emergence of equivalence. And this study supports previous results by other researchers, that equivalence performance is related to levels of verbal behavior. Interesting is the classification used in this study. They apply the classification from the CABAS framework. Divided into; Listener/Prespeaker, Speaker/Prereader, Speaker/Reader, and Reader/Writer (Greer and Ross, 2007). I have never seen this classification used in this kind of research, and find it useful that they use an already much used classification based on the analysis of verbal behavior. It would be a great step forward for research in this area if several studies could use the same classification. But I do raise some questions regarding the description of ASD who is divided into Mild and Moderate without further information, but as this is not included in the discussion of results, it probably does not matter.

The study discuss the results in terms of the theory of naming facilitating equivalence and the position of RFT, stating that MTS and exemplar training facilitate the emergence of equivalence. The data gathered in this study can not support one over the other, but as the article states “the findings are consistent with existing empirical evidence that demonstrates the utility of exemplar training int the facilitation or establishment of derived relations as equivalence.”

The data indicate that the familiarity of stimuli correlated with rapid training and test performance, and that children who failed the equivalence test with unfamiliar stimuli passed the test with familiar stimuli. So, this study support the notion that familiar stimuli facilitate the production of equivalence. The data indicate this both with the normally developing children and the children with ASD.

This study included an antecedent, actually “goes with…”. And the data shows that this antecedent influenced the responding. This could as far as I see it, give the study a bias toward also testing the children’s listener-reportoar, and this may influence the data showing trails needed to achieve equivalence. It would be useful if some research could be done to investigate the impact such an antecedent has on performance.

I really appreciate the good and accurate description of the phases in the experiment. It´s really great to se that one describe the procedures in such a manner that one easier can evaluate the results, and doing it possible for others to replicate the experiment!

Happy reading!