Award Date

5-1-2022

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Early Childhood, Multilingual, and Special Education

First Committee Member

Joshua Baker

Second Committee Member

Joseph Morgan

Third Committee Member

Wendy Rodgers

Fourth Committee Member

Tiberio Garza

Number of Pages

232

Abstract

Tact is the most important verbal operant (Skinner, 1957) due to the uniqueness of stimulus control and its role in facilitating acquisition of another verbal (e.g., mands, intraverbals) and nonverbal (i.e., listener) operants (Sundberg, 2015). Teaching tacts to children with ASD and the research on this area, however, are largely focused on visual stimuli. Teaching tacts of auditory stimuli to children with ASD is important as they constantly experience various auditory stimuli (e.g., vehicles, pets, machines, music) in the natural environment. Adding auditory and other nonvisual tacts to tact repertoire increases its effectiveness (Sundberg & Partington, 1998). Furthermore, teaching auditory tacts help children with visual impairment who do not respond to visual stimuli (Sundberg & Partington, 1998). Despite the importance of teaching auditory tacts to children with ASD, only one study examined it (i.e., Hanney et al., 2019).This study aimed to examine the effectiveness of using SPOP and MET on the number of auditory tacts for a child with ASD, generalization to untrained stimuli, maintenance of auditory tacts for one week following the last postintervention probes, and the social significance of the intervention from the perspective of the participant and her parent. To examine the effectiveness of SPOP and MET, a multiple-probe design across stimulus sets (Horner & Baer, 1978) was used. The data revealed that the intervention package had a modest effect as the functional relation between the intervention and number of correct tacts existed among some, but not all, target tacts. Similarly, generalization and maintenance were limited to some target tacts. The participant and her parent were generally satisfied, but the procedure was difficult to the parent. It is important to note that the study was limited to one participant. Therefore, the findings may not generalize to other learners with ASD.

Controlled Subject

Autism in children;Autistic children;Autism in children--Treatment;Children with autism spectrum disorders

Disciplines

Special Education and Teaching

File Format

pdf

File Size

2300 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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