Evaluating stimulus-stimulus pairing presentations : massed pairing trials in comparison to conventional pairing trials

Document Type

Thesis

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Psychology

Degree

M.S. Applied Behavior Analysis

Date Completed

2017

First Committee Member

Ahearn, William H.

Second Committee Member

Hanley, Gregory P.

Third Committee Member

Karsten, Amanda M.

Abstract

"Individuals with developmental disabilities often display deficits in communication (Sundberg & Michael, 2001). This study compared two auditory stimulus presentation styles of the stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP) procedure in an attempt to increase vocalizations in two students with autism. Direct reinforcement of emitting the phoneme following a prompt was introduced once increases in target vocalizations occurred during the SSP condition. This combination of procedures was attempted to produce echoics by pairing the auditory stimulus with a preferred stimulus and to then bring the response under the control of reinforcement in the presence of an echoic prompt. Data were collected on the frequency of target and non-target vocalizations for both participants and were summarized as responses per minute across conditions. A parallel-treatments design was implemented to compare procedural variations of SSP across phoneme sets within and across participants. Verbal operant probes were conducted before and after training that assessed whether responding was under echoic control. Results for both participants suggested the variation of SSP with 3 presentations per minute of the auditory stimulus was more effective in increasing target vocalizations than the variation of SSP with 12 presentations per minute of the auditory stimulus. Direct reinforcement of vocal imitation following increases in target vocalizations seemed to facilitate the production of echoics. A mand-model procedure was implemented in an attempt to increase vocalizations if the SSP + direct reinforcement procedures were insufficient in producing echoic behavior."

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