Title: Teaching Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder to Report Past Behavior With the Use of a Speech-Generating Device
Abstract: In day-to-day interactions, children are expected to report their past behavior accurately, answering questions such as "Did you finish your homework?"or "Who did you see at school?" Accurately responding to questions and describing events are a noted deficit for some children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and a common caregiver priority for intervention (Pituch et al., 2011).For example, parents' intervention goals may include teaching their child to report how he or she had been hurt; thus, there may be safety risks when this repertoire is missing.Skinner (1957) described reporting past behavior as self-tacting.Self-tacting is verbal behavior controlled by "current stimuli, including events within the speaker [him-or her]self, generated by the question, in combination with a history of earlier conditioning" (Skinner, 1957, p. 143).This could be interpreted to mean that the question posed to the speaker in conjunction with the speaker's private events, such as thoughts or images, evokes the response.Palmer (2016) introduced the term intraverbal control to distinguish responses that are evoked by private and public antecedent stimuli, such as reporting past behavior, from intraverbal responses under strictly verbal antecedent control.Responses under intraverbal control may happen as follows: A caregiver poses a question (e.g., "What did you eat for snack?"); mediating behavior on the part of the listener occurs (perhaps a self-echoic and visual imagining of the event); and in combination, these antecedents evoke the correct vocal response (e.g., "Crackers."),which is then reinforced (e.g., "That sounds yummy!").Palmer (1991) suggests one challenge to recalling past events is that there is a "failure to reinstate all of the relevant stimulus conditions" (p.266) necessary to control