ABA Lesson 9/10&11&12

Question 1

What are the Theories of Language?

Answer 1

Question 2

Verbal Operants

Answer 2

A unit of verbal behavior that responds to motivating operations and/or discriminative stimuli and functions to obtain reinforcement from the environment.

Question 3

Operant?

Answer 3

Involving the modification of behavior by the reinforcing or inhibiting effect of its own consequences.

Question 4

What are the Language Measures?

Answer 4

The only difference is, in the behavior analytic report, the information will be provided in terms of the operants, which gives us what we need in order to design interventions, including discriminative stimuli and reinforcement, or sometimes to let us know that we have to develop things into reinforcers before we can expect the verbal skill to develop. Because that behavior analytic assessment report is going to give those bits of information about what is reinforcing to the child and what reinforcers are missing

Question 5

Topography?

Answer 5

The response topography of Pavlov’s dogs was salivation in response to the food and the bell. Another example is your reaction when a friend startles you. The response topography could be a range of things including jumping, gasping or shrieking, grabbing your heart, or running away.

Question 6

What are the Language Units?

Answer 6

Question 7

What are the Early Verbal Operants? Elements of communication?

Answer 7

They are Echoic, Mand, Tact and Intraverbal

Question 8

Point-to-Point Correspondence

Answer 8

The stimulus and response products match in entirety; that is, the response is an exact duplication of the stimulus.

Question 9

SD meaning?

Answer 9

is formally defined as “a stimulus in the presence of which a particular response will be reinforced”.
- tells the person what behavior is going to get reinforced
- it signals the availability of a particular reinforcer for a particular behavior.
An SD, or discriminative stimulus, is the instruction or other antecedent evoking a response. When an instructor says “touch your nose”, that instruction is the SD for the child to touch his nose.

Question 10

Augmentative and Alternative Communication (Les 11)

Answer 10

Forms of communication that do not require speaking. It includes all the ways a person communicates, except for speaking, such as sign language.

Question 11

What’s Sign Language?

Answer 11

A mode of communication that employs signs made with the hands and other movements, including facial expressions and postures of the body, to communicate messages.

Question 12

What are the Forms of Sign Language?

Answer 12

1) Formal Sign Language
Includes vocabulary, grammar, and syntax
Wholly different from their regional spoken languages.
Generally used by people who are culturally deaf (have never heard spoken words).
Examples: American Sign Language, British Sign Language, etc.

2) Pidgin Sign Languages
Blends signs from formal sign language with regional spoken language syntax.
Usually used by people who have lost their hearing (native spoken language users).

3) Idiosyncratic Signing
Usually not a fully formed language - no grammar/syntax
Signs may or may not come from formal signing lexicons
Most often used by people who have language disorders, may be unrelated to hearing impairment.

Question 13

Prompt (Les 12)

Answer 13

1) A supplemental antecedent stimulus that is used when a stimulus does not reliably control a target response. In other words, if the learner does not initiate the action that they are expected to initiate when a stimulus occurs, you will intervene with a prompt.
2) auxiliary, extra or artificial stimuli that are presented immediately before or after the stimuli that will eventually cue a learner to display the behavior of interest at the appropriate time or in the relevant circumstances.

Question 14

Prompt Contingency

Answer 14

The typical three-term contingency involves a stimulus followed by behavior, followed by reinforcement. Whenever we are teaching and we want to insert a prompt, we’re going to do that in between the stimulus and the behavior. So the contingency becomes stimulus, prompt, behavior, reinforcement
- the prompt contingency is stimulus with a prompt, followed by the behavior, followed by reinforcement.

Question 15

What are the categories of prompts?

Answer 15

There are six categories of prompts: physical prompts, modeling, verbal prompts, gestural prompts, textual or graphic prompts and stimulus prompts.

Question 16

Prompt definition more elaborated

Answer 16

Instuctions, gestures, demonstrations, touches, or other things that we arrange, or do, to increase the likelihood that children will make correct responses

Question 17

What is the goal of prompt?

Answer 17

is to use the least intrusive form of prompt in order to teach and to prevent, if possible, your learner from making errors.

Question 18

What are the forms of prompts?

Answer 18

1) Verbal prompt - words, instuctions or questions that are meant to direct a person to engage in a target response.
2) Demonstate or model a response - typically done in collaboration with verbal prompts and only for a learner that already has good imitations skills. The peer or adult model will prompt and deliver reinforcement

Question 19

What are the variations of modeling?

Answer 19

1) Video Modeling - video recorded models are used to teach a skill; e.g. record a peer engaging in activity and show to learner.
2) Video Self Modeling - you would video record your learner only in cases successfully engaging in a target behavior.

Question 20

Gesteral Prompt?

Answer 20

Includes: 1) pointining, 2) motioning or 3) nodding toward another person, materials or an activity to indicate an action to be performed. They are often used as a part of an entire prompt package and not used in isolation.

Question 21

Manual or Physical Prompting

Answer 21

Physical contact from an instructor that is designed to help the learner display a behavior of interest.

Question 22

Graduated guidance

Answer 22

When using prompts, you can use a system of decreasing assistance from most to least.

Question 23

Delayed Prompting?

Answer 23

1) Constant Time Delay
2) Progressive Time Delay

Question 24

Stimulus Prompts?

Answer 24

We use the actual stimuli to do the prompting for us, like a positional prompt.
Properties to Alter: Volume, Shape, Pics, Numerals etc.

Question 25

Extra Stimulus Prompts?

Answer 25

Question 26

Least to Most Prompting

Answer 26

The behavior analyst will have already conducted a baseline assessment and identified what level of prompt instruction should begin with. So you will present the stimulus and then the prompt and if the correct response is given to the first prompt, you will provide whatever reinforcement has been prescribed. The teaching plan will include what to do after your learner provides some predetermined number of correct responses, instructions for decreasing the initial prompt.
It is a prompting strategy where the teacher/parent progresses through a prompting hierarchy (like the one shown above) from the assumed least intrusive prompt to the most intrusive prompt necessary to obtain a correct response from the child.
e.g. help child to learn how to brush their teeth. Your initial instruction may be to provide hand over hand assistance in assembling the task, and once the learner has been successful five times consecutively, then you may decrease your physical prompt to what we call a minimal physical prompt, where perhaps you just put their hands in the correct initial placement and they are able to finish the task. If an incorrect response is given with least to most prompting, then you’re going to increase the prompt level, but you do not deliver reinforcement.

Question 27

Most to Least Prompting

Answer 27

We’re going to begin with what’s called an errorless learning prompt. This means that the baseline assessment that your behavior analyst made determined at what level of prompt was necessary to ensure that the person never made a mistake. So your instruction this time would begin with that errorless prompt and you would reinforce after correct responding even though there was no opportunity for the person to do it incorrectly.
As with least to most prompting, you will have criteria for determining how many correct responses are necessary before decreasing to a slightly less intrusive starting prompt. Incorrect responses, with most to least prompting occur when the person resists the prompt. So problem behavior may emerge. Or as an RBT, you’re going to have a lot of skills. But still, things are going to occur that are not in your control. So the error will either be resistance or some sort of happenstance situation.
e.g. If we’re assisting a child to cut with a knife, then our highest level of prompting would certainly be hand over hand. The next level prompt might be just having the adult rest their hands on the hands of the child, but not really being charge of the motion of moving the knife. But if the child made an error, you’re right there and very quickly able to just increase your control of the knife again.

Question 28

What’s prompt fading?

Answer 28

Gradually reducing prompting procedures. It is the gradual removal of those prompts until they are no longer existing.

Question 29

Response effort

Answer 29

The amount of ease or difficulty with which a person can complete a task. This influences the frequency with which the task will be performed.

Question 30

Prompt Dependence

Answer 30

Continued reliance on a prompt to initiate the performance of a mastered behavior.
- prompt fading is one way to avoid the development of dependence and to correct it if it has already occurred

Question 31

Stimulus Control

Answer 31

Behavioral response occurs in the presence of a particular stimulus, but not in its absence.
- When you have true stimulus control, the behavior not only is initiated when the stimulus occurs, but it’s not initiated unless the stimulus occurs.

Question 32

Stimulus Control Transfer

Answer 32

Systematic reduction of prompts (fading) and reinforcement (fading) to achieve the final goal of stimulus control.
- The behavior is strictly occurring because the stimulus is present.

Question 33

What are the methods of stimulus control transfer?

Answer 33

• Prompt Fading
• Prompt Delay
• Stimulus Fading

Question 34

What’s Prompt Delay?

Answer 34

A stimulus control transfer procedure in which the trainer inserts a pause between the discriminative stimulus and the supplemental prompt in order to give the learner time to respond without depending on the prompt. Delays may be constant (always the same amount of time) or progressive (the pauses are gradually increased).

Question 35

Stimulus Fading?

Answer 35

Gradually decreasing the saliency of a stimulus prompt.

Question 36

Salience?

Answer 36

Degree to which an object or characteristic is noticeable.