Evaluation of a discrimination training procedure for establishing praise as a reinforcer.

We evaluated the effects of a discrimination training procedure for establishing praise as a reinforcer for three children with autism spectrum disorder. After establishing two praise words as discriminative stimuli and two nonsense words as S-deltas, we evaluated whether the stimuli then functioned as reinforcers by presenting each stimulus as a consequence for a new response. The results demonstrated that previously neutral praise words functioned as reinforcers and nonsense words did not.

Effects of exposure to prompts on the acquisition of intraverbals in children with autism spectrum disorder.

The current experiment is a systematic replication of previous studies that evaluated the efficiency of echoic and tact prompts on the acquisition of intraverbals (i.e., French-to-English translations) following exposure to each prompt type.

Teaching children with autism spectrum disorder to tact olfactory stimuli.

Research on tact acquisition by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has often focused on teaching participants to tact visual stimuli. It is important to evaluate procedures for teaching tacts of nonvisual stimuli (e.g.