Ensino de Discriminações de Sílabas e Emergência da Leitura Recombinativa em Crianças com Transtorno do Espectro Autista

Abstract

Difficulties in reading instruction are recurrent among children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), especially when teaching methods disregard the importance of preventing restricted stimulus control and promoting recombinative reading—challenges frequently observed in this population. Previous studies indicate that the explicit teaching of conditional discriminations involving minimal units of words, such as syllables, can promote the emergence of recombinative reading with comprehension. The present study aimed to investigate the effects of teaching conditional discriminations of syllables on the emergence of recombinative naming of new syllables and phrases, recombinative textual reading with comprehension, and the formation of new words in children with ASD. The research was conducted in the participants’ homes in Belém, PA, with two children diagnosed with ASD, aged 6 and 11 years, who had no prior repertoire of syllable naming, using a cumulative baseline experimental design. Stage I included phases of gradual teaching of syllable discriminations and tests of oral naming of the taught and recombined syllables. Stage II consisted exclusively of tests of emergent textual reading and reading with comprehension. Data were recorded manually by the researcher through direct observation, with daily intervention sessions. The results indicated that teaching conditional discriminations of syllables promoted the emergence of the targeted repertoires, except for sentence.