Nomeação bidirecional e incidental em crianças com autismo: efeitos da exigência de ecoicos no ensino por múltiplos exemplares

Abstract

Bidirectional Naming (BN) is a behavioral repertoire that implies that teaching speaker responses to objects/events will result in the emergence of listener responses to those objects/events, and vice-versa. The establishment of this repertoire as a generalized behavioral relation results in Incidental Bidirectional Naming (IBN) (the emergence of speaker and listener responses to objects/events following incidental exposure to their names), which is considered a pivotal repertoire in language development. Multiple Exemplar Instruction (MEI) is a procedure that has been shown to be effective in inducing IBN in autistic individuals. The present study examined the effect of MEI consisting of randomized trials of auditory-visual match-to-sample (AVMTS) and intraverbal tact, with echoic requirement (MEIwec) and without echoic requirement (MEIwoec) in the AVMTS trials, on the induction of BN and IBN in four autistic children. Participants were exposed to up to five experimental stages: NB/NBI pre-tests; MEI (wec and/or woec); NB/NBI post-tests; and NB/NBI generalization and maintenance tests. It was found that two participants who were exposed to MEIwec, as well as one who was exposed to MEIwoec, presented NB and NBI in the post-tests. Another participant, who was first exposed to MEIwoec and then to MEIwec, did not present NB and NBI in the post-tests. The need to investigate the role of the reinforcing function of social consequence stimuli and the reinforcing function of observation responses to stimuli in the occurrence of echoic and listener responses as modulators of the effect of MEI in the induction of NB and NBI is discussed.