The Effects of Daily Intensive Tact Instruction on Preschool Students' Emission of Pure Tacts and Mands in Non-Instructional Setting.

Abstract We tested the effects of an intensive tact instruction procedure on numbers of tacts emitted in non-instructional settings (NIS) using a multiple probe design across 3participants (3and 4-year old boys with autism). The dependent variable was tacts emitted in NIS before/after the mastery of sets of 5 different stimuli. The non-instructional settings included the toy area of the classroom, lunchtime, and the school hallway during transition. All probe sessions were conducted daily for a cumulative 15 minutes, 5 minutes in each NIS. Intensive instruction involved increasing the tact instructions to 100-tact learn units above the daily learn units students were receiving daily. The intervention increased vocal verbal operants (tacts and mands) emitted by the target students in NIS. ********** One of, if not the, strongest predictors of schools school success is language (Weikart, 1966). Children with native intellectual disabilities and children from impoverished backgrounds frequently lack functional verbal repertoires when they enter schools. Hart and Risley (1995) found that limited exposure to rich language experiences early one in life is a predictor of language deficits in children from low socioeconomic backgrounds. They found that children from low socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds added an average of "168 words in the 6 months from 30-36 months [while] the children in professional families added an average of 350 or twice as many" (Hart & Risley, 1995, p. 164). From early on, these children develop language and expand their vocabulary at the much slower rate than their peers from the middle class families and over time this gap widens exponentially (Greenwood, Hart, Walker, & Risely, 1994). Woods (1984) found that children with similar low SES backgrounds also emit fewer verbal interactions than their same-age peers from middle class families. When children with native disabilities lack certain verbal capabilities, they inadvertently have infrequent language experiences. Even when children with deficits in language experiences receive behavioral language interventions, their prior lack of language experiences call for the provision of intensive language learning instruction (Greer, Chavez-Brown, Nirgudkar, Stolfi, & Rivera-Valdes, 2005; Greer & Keohane, 2005; Greer, Stolfi, Chavez-Brown, & Rivera-Valdes, 2005). For both types of children intensive language experiences are needed to compensate for deficits in experiences. According to Woods, when the verbal antecedents from the parents were absent, children with native disabilities were usually silent, whereas typically developing children were more likely to have nonverbal antecedents. That is these children were less likely to emit "spontaneous" speech. It appears that typically developing children were more likely to respond to nonverbal antecedents or initiate verbal interactions--that is they responded to the natural establishing operations that control this type of verbal functions. Skinner (1957) characterized these spontaneous verbal initiations as pure mand and pure tact verbal operants. While pure mands are important, building the tact repertoire is most critical to the expansion of verbal repertoires. One reason children with disabilities are often observed not to emit pure tacts apart from instructional setting is that the tact that they are taught is often under the partial antecedent of the verbalizations control of others; that is, impure rather than pure tacts are taught. One may teach the pure tact repertoire by avoiding verbal antecedents may and bringing the tact responses of the student under natural establishing operations. Indeed, Williams and Greer (1993) found that when the establishing operations for pure mands and tacts where incorporated in teaching tacts and verbal antecedents were avoided, their participants emitted more of what is typically characterized as spontaneous speech or the initiation of language interactions. …