Atenção conjunta e repertórios verbais em crianças com autismo

Abstract

This work brought together a literature review and two experimental studies in order to investigate the relationship between joint attention (JA) and verbal repertoires in children with autism. The first study reviewed studies based on Behavior Analysis methodologies and procedures that investigated the teaching of JA for children with autism, trying to describe and analyze the variables involved in teaching joint attention responses (JAR) and initiation of joint attention (IJA). The first experimental study investigated in three children with autism functional relationships that could be established between social conditional discriminative stimuli/reinforcers and JA, tact and mand. The second experimental study evaluated in three children with autism who had joint attention the relationship between expressive and receptive vocabulary. The literature review showed that Behavior Analysis provides efficient technologies to teach JAR and IJA, but that JAR is more easily installed than the IJA. The results of empirical studies 1) indicate that the JA is important for children with autism properly establish the object-name relationship displayed by adults and thus expand and generalize these learned verbal relations; and 2) have suggested the need for expansion of reinforcing community of this population and the intensive tact instruction in order to increase the opportunities that the child will recruit adult attention as a conditioned social reinforcer.