Avaliação de relações de controle durante o ensino de relações arbitrárias e teste de equivalência em crianças com síndrome de Down

Abstract

The lack of effective methodologies to facilitate the learning of the linguistic behavior of people with disorders and /or learning difficulties has led to multiple studies aimed at the creation of procedures for these purposes. One of the methods developed is the Multigestos, which proposes the teaching of sounds/phonemes and articulatory movements of the mouth with the aid of gestures. A procedure also widely used for teaching atypical children is matching-to-sample, which aims to establish arbitrary relations between stimuli. In this research, it was proposed the automated application of the matching-to-sample procedure to teach arbitrary relations between Multigestos stimuli (the sound of letters and facial articulation and corresponding gestures) named Set A, vowels (Set B) and figures (Set C), in order to establish equivalence classes between these stimuli in children with Down Syndrome. It was also purposed the evaluation of control relations established during baseline training, as control by rejection and/or selection, by means of the mask procedure; finally, the control by the visual and auditory properties of the sample (Set A) was evaluated. Two participants were exposed to the individualized teaching of AB and AC relations, and to the BC and CB emergence tests, and control tests by the auditory and visual components of the Set A models on the Sets B and C choices. Both subjects learned the AB and AC relations directly trained, presenting 100% correct performance after 26 training sessions. One of them presented nearly perfect performances (close to 100% accuracy) in the BC and CB transitivity symmetry tests, rejection and selection control in the AB and AC baseline choices, and control by the auditory and visual components of the sample on the choices on the same baseline. The other participant, however, did not achieved emergent relations B-C, C-B, nor control over the auditory and visual components of the models; this participant was not exposed to the evaluation of selection and rejection control relations. The results show the effectiveness of the automatized Multigestos method combined with matching-tos ample procedure for establishing basic literacy repertoire; but indicated the need to improve the procedure for one of the participants. We suggest, for example, more extensive baseline training after 100% hit criteria and exposure to mask training at the baseline, before the emerging performance tests.