ABSTRACT

The purposes of this study were to explore what teaching strategy would be more effective in the speech acquisition for children with autism spectrum disorder, and to determine whether learned speech from the mand and tact training would be transferred to other verbal operant conditions. To investigate these research questions, 3 children with autism spectrum disorder participated in this study and alternating treatment designs were used to study the effects of independent variables including errorless learning and Systematic fading on the speech language acquisition. Results indicated that Systematic fading was more effective than Errorless learning for all participants to acquire verbal responses across the mand and tact training settings. Also, all three participants demonstrated skill transition for using target words from the trained verbal operant condition to other non trained verbal operant conditions. Discussion and implications on these findings would be addressed.

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