Pareamento entre estímulos e imitação vocal em crianças com Transtorno do Espectro do Autismo: Avaliação do papel das respostas de orientação

Abstract

In the stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure (SSP), the experimenter pairs a target sound (“bah”, for example) with a child’s preferred item or event, such as eating a cookie. Thus, the present research aims to assess the effects of a guidance component on the effectiveness of SSP in children diagnosed with autism. An experimental design of multiple baselines between subjects was used. Three children participated in the study, all of them submitted to two types of SSP: (A) the SPP without the requirement of an orientation response to stimuli, and (B) the SPP with the requirement of an orientation response to the stimuli. In the condition with no guidance response requirement (A), the experimenter emitted the target sound and delivered the preferred item, without any prompting for a child to pay attention to the target sound. In the condition with an orientation response requirement, before performing the pairing or experimenterprovide a hint for a child to pay attention to the sound. In the condition requiring an orientationresponse, before performing the pairing, the experimenter provided the cue to hold the child's hand and bring it to their own face. There was a total of 11 intervals of 15 minutes each with anaverage interval of 2 minutes between pairings. The individual performance of each participantwas analyzed, comparing the initial phase of SPP without orientation requirement (A) with a final phase of SPP with orientation requirement. The data showed considerable discrepancy between phase A and phase B for participant 3, for P2 the difference between the phases was smaller but recorded a higher occurrence of target responses in phase B and for P1 the result wasthe opposite of the hypothesis, that is, P1 presented greater vocalization of target responsesin phase A of the SSP procedure. The data suggest that the initial repertoire of the participants is a relevant variable in the study, in addition to considering that the increase in vocalizations may have an operant contingency in place.