Estudos sobre discriminações envolvendo estímulos auditivos vocais em crianças diagnosticadas com TEA

Abstract

The establishment of voices as reinforcers can help teaching auditory-visual discriminations with spoken words as stimuli. Considering the importance of establishing auditory-visual discrimination with vocal stimuli for the development of social and communication skills, especially among individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), three studies were conducted in order to 1. Identify relations between performances on the Assessment of Basic Learning Abilities-Revised (ABLA-R) and level of exposure to human voices; 2. Verify the efficacy of a stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure via an application to increase the exposure to voices in participants with little attention to voices on Study 1; and 3. Check if there are differences in the emergence of visual-visual versus auditory-visual relations on the equivalence class formation paradigm after training fully visual versus auditory-visual relations in children with Level 4 in the ABLA-R test. Six, three and six children with ASD participated in three studies, respectively. The results from the first study point no relation between exposure to voices and the ABLA-R Level, suggesting the need for future studies to investigate this hypothesis with a more significant number of participants. In Study 2, the stimulus stimulus pairing procedure did not produce a significant increase in the percentage of exposure to voices. In the third study, five participants demonstrated to learn the visual visual arbitrary relationships, but not auditory-visual ones suggesting that, although the procedure used is an alternative for teaching arbitrary visual relationships, it is still necessary to develop appropriate procedures to overcome the challenge of teaching auditory-visual relations to children with severely delayed development.