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Evaluation of a Blocked-Trials Procedure to Establish Complex Stimulus Control over Intraverbal Responses in Children with Autism

  • Special Section: The Intraverbal Relation
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Abstract

We evaluated the use of a blocked-trials procedure to establish complex stimulus control over intraverbal responses. The participants were four young boys with a diagnosis of autism who had struggled to master intraverbals. The blocked-trials procedures involved presentation of stimuli in separate trial blocks. The trial blocks gradually reduced in size contingent upon correct responding, until the stimuli were presented in quasi-random order. All participants acquired multiple discriminations with the blocked-trials procedure, although additional procedures were needed to teach the first discrimination with two participants. Following acquisition of multiple discriminations, two participants acquired a novel discrimination with quasi-random presentation of stimuli, and a third participant demonstrated discriminated responding in intraverbal probes.

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Acknowledgments

The first and second authors (Ingvarsson and Kramer) were supported in part through a grant from the Texas Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services (DARS; Grant Award No. 5382001406). We thank Mark Sundberg for helpful suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Behavior Analysis, University of North Texas, 1155 Union Circle, Box 310919, Denton, TX, 76203-0919, USA

    Einar T. Ingvarsson & Heather Macias

  2. Child Study Center, Fort Worth, TX, USA

    Einar T. Ingvarsson & Rachel L. Kramer

  3. McNeese State University, Lake Charles, LA, USA

    Charlotte L. Carp

  4. Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, USA

    Anna I. Pétursdóttir

Authors
  1. Einar T. Ingvarsson
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  2. Rachel L. Kramer
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  3. Charlotte L. Carp
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  4. Anna I. Pétursdóttir
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  5. Heather Macias
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Correspondence to Einar T. Ingvarsson.

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Funding

This study was supported in part through a grant from the Texas Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services (DARS; Grant Award No. 5382001406).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Human Subjects Institutional Review Board at University of North Texas and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained for all individual participants included in the study. Participants could leave the study at any time, and assent was obtained during each session.

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This article is part of a special section on The Intraverbal Relation.

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Ingvarsson, E.T., Kramer, R.L., Carp, C.L. et al. Evaluation of a Blocked-Trials Procedure to Establish Complex Stimulus Control over Intraverbal Responses in Children with Autism. Analysis Verbal Behav 32, 205–224 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40616-016-0071-5

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