This study explored bilingual approaches to establishing communication repertoires for culturally and linguistically diverse nonverbal autistic children. We explored concurrent English and Spanish mand instruction across language-specific contexts (i.e., blocked vs. shuffled language trials). Participants first received communication intervention…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder commonly exhibit vocal stereotypy, and this behavior may be targeted for treatment when it competes with daily tasks, disrupts the environment, or leads to reduced independence. Previous research has shown that access to music reduces vocal stereotypy. However, treatment evaluations typically occur during…

There is a growing body of research examining the efficacy of teaching a foreign language using procedures that would lead to generative learning. This study assessed the acquisition of foreign tacts and the emergence of bidirectional intraverbal responses (native-foreign and foreign-native) as a function of target stimulus preference. Three…

Previous research has shown that contingent vocal imitation has a reinforcing effect on vocalizations emitted by children. Nevertheless, the precise contingencies that have a reinforcing effect on vocalizations remain unclear. This study examined the effects of five conditions (contingent vocal imitation, contingent interaction, noncontingent…

Rodriguez et al. (2022) discovered that teaching four component skills was sufficient to facilitate the emergence of intraverbal tacts across four applications with three participants. Our study replicated and evaluated an extension of this procedure that was directed at facilitating intraverbal tacts when a child learns the component skills but…

Autoclitics are secondary verbal operants that are controlled by a feature of the conditions that occasion or evoke a primary verbal operant such as a tact or mand. Qualifying autoclitics extend, negate, or assert a speaker's primary verbal response and modify the intensity or direction of the listener's behavior. Howard and Rice (1988)…

Intraverbal tacts are an example of multiply controlled verbal behavior. More specifically, they are verbal responses under control of both a nonverbal (visual) stimulus (e.g., a green ball) and a verbal (auditory) stimulus (e.g., "What color?" vs. "What shape?"). Studies have shown that verbal behavior training can be arranged…

Mastery criteria can be applied to individual targets or stimuli organized into sets. Wong et al. (2021) and Wong and Fienup (2022) found that participants who received special education services learned sight words more rapidly when an individual target mastery criterion was applied. The current study replicated and extended these findings across…

The Good Behavior Game (GBG) is an effective procedure for reducing disruptive classroom behavior. Students in three fifth-grade classes selected the rules of the GBG and then experienced the GBG with different forms of feedback for rule violations (vocal and visual, vocal only, visual only, no feedback). Following an initial baseline, the four…

Children with autism spectrum disorder often demonstrate difficulty communicating with others, and this may affect the extent to which they can engage in contextually appropriate language during play. This study examined the effects of a social script-training intervention using generic picture cues on the number of contextually appropriate play…