Effects of Conditioning Voices as Reinforcers for Listener Responses on Rate of Learning, Awareness, and Preferences for Listening to Stories in Preschoolers With Autism

In this experiment we tested the utility of conditioning voices as reinforcers for listening on (a) acquisition of curricular objectives; (b) attention to, or awareness of, the presence of adults and their voices; (c) preferences for listening to stories in a free-play setting; and (d) emission of stereotypy in the story setting. From a theoretical perspective, the experiment addresses the verbal behavior developmental theory (VBDT) position that conditioned reinforcement for attending to voices is a developmental cusp that makes it possible for children to learn from instruction (Greer & Ross, 2008; Greer & Speckman, 2009). From an applied perspective, the experiment tests a procedure for its usefulness in making it possible for children with severe delays to accelerate learning, choose to listen to adults tell stories in a free play setting, and acquire awareness of adults in their environment. According to the VBDT, the presence of prerequisite and co-requisite behavioral developmental cusps makes it possible for children to make contact with the instructional benefits of environmental experiences. Rosales-Ruiz and Baer (1996) introduced the notion that behavioral developmental cusps enable children to learn new operants because the new behavioral cusps allow the children to get in touch with the contingencies that follow contact with new aspects of their environment. The newly acquired cusp results in the ability to learn what a child could not learn before and accelerates the establishment of new stimulus control (Greer & Keohane, 2005; Greer & Ross, 2008; Greer & Speckman, 2009). Developmental cusps may also include the establishment of conditioned reinforcers for observing responses (Keohane, Pereira-Delgado, & Greer, 2009). Studies on the effects of conditioning reinforcers for observing responses have reported accelerated learning of responses associated with the newly conditioned reinforcers for observing responses (Dinsmoor, 1983; Keohane, Luke, & Greer, 2008; Keohane et al., 2009; Pereira-Delgado, Greer, Speckman, & Goswami, 2009; Tsai & Greer, 2006). The observing responses are new operants (Holland, 1958) and these new operants make it possible to acquire discriminative stimulus control that was previously difficult if not impossible to attain. Some current theories of verbal behavior suggest that “to be truly verbal,” listener and speaker repertoires must be joined such that children have naming (Horne & Lowe, 1996; Greer, Stolfi, Chavez-Brown, Nirgudkar, & Rivera-Valdes, 2005; Greer, Stolfi, & Pistoljevic, 2007; Pistoljevic, 2008), self-talk conversational units (Lodhi & Greer, 1989), and say-do correspondence (Paniagua & Baer, 1982). While these recent expansions of Skinner's (1957) theory incorporate greater attention to the listener than Skinner did in his initial analysis, Skinner's notion that verbal behavior often requires behaving simultaneously as both listener and speaker was also implicit in his initial thesis. The VBDT proposes that the learning and developmental processes leading to the intercept of the initially independent speaker and listener repertoires requires acquisition of separate speaker and listener cusps. These are foundational cusps that must be present if the listener and speaker repertoires are to be joined (Greer & Keohane, 2005; Greer & Ross, 2008; Greer & Speckman, 2009; Keohane et al., 2008). One of the key developmental cusps that would appear to be necessary, even before what is spoken has a listener function, is the capacity to be reinforced for attending to voices. Research with young typically developing and sensorially intact infants reported that the voices of mothers are a conditioned reinforcer for observing at birth (DeCasper & Spence, 1987). These data propose that the conditioning process occurred in the uterus. In other words, the mother's voice is paired with feeding in the uterus, which conditions the mother's voice as a reinforcer for listening (DeCasper & Spence, 1987). The mother's voice then selects out the infant's attention and the infant responds to her voice significantly more than a stranger's voice (DeCasper & Spence; Ockleford, Vince, Layton, & Reader, 1988). This pairing may not occur or may be defective in some children. Typically developing children acquire aspects of their parents' language without special instruction or direct reinforcement (Bijou & Baer, 1965; Hart & Risley, 1995; Moerk, 1990; Mowrer, 1954; Novak, 1996; Schlinger, 1995). Some suggest that such incidental learning is traceable to automatic reinforcement for emitting speech that corresponds to what the child hears spoken (Skinner, 1957; Vaughan & Michael, 1982). Of course, the sound of what is spoken by the child can only automatically reinforce her/his speech if attending to the voice of adults is a conditioned reinforcer for observing or attention to voices. This is thought to occur naturally as a result of the pairing of the voice with an established form of reinforcement as proposed by Schlinger (1995). For more than four decades, stimulus-stimulus pairing procedures have been successfully used to expand the pool of stimuli that function as reinforcers for behavior or an individuals' community of reinforcers, by teaching children to prefer previously non-preferred stimuli via stimulus-stimulus pairings (Greer, Becker, Saxe, & Mirabella, 1985; Greer, Dorow, & Hanser, 1973; Greer, Dorow, Wachhaus, & White, 1973; Keohane et al., 2008; Longano & Greer, 2006; Nuzzolo-Gomez, Leonard, Ortiz, Rivera, & Greer, 2002; Pereira-Delgado et al., 2009; Tsai & Greer, 2006). Existing evidence appears to affirm the role of conditioned reinforcers as a behavioral explanatory construct (Williams, 1994). Research on stimulus-stimulus pairing to condition reinforcers in experimental analyses in applied settings can be separated into two categories, with the conditioned reinforcement as either (a) the dependent or (b) independent variable. When conditioned reinforcement has been treated as the dependent variable, stimulus-stimulus pairings have been used to condition books as reinforcers for observing responses, previously non-preferred music as a newly conditioned reinforcers for choice responses (Greer, Dorow, Hanser, 1973; Greer, Dorow, Wachhaus, et al., 1973; Greer, et al., 1985), books as reinforcers for observing responses in free play, or toys and computer screens as reinforcers for observing (Longano & Greer, 2006; Nuzzolo-Gomez, et al., 2002). Sundberg, Michael, Partington, and Sundberg (1996), Yoon (1998), and Yoon & Bennett (2006) also reported that pairing preferred stimuli with hearing vocal sounds emitted by adults resulted in increases in children emitting parroting responses (Skinner, 1957) in free play settings. In some of the studies (Greer, et al. 1985; Longano & Greer, 2006; Nuzzolo, et al. 2002), the newly conditioned reinforcers for play or observing responses also resulted in significant decreases in, or elimination of, stereotypical behaviors in free play. This led the authors of these papers to suggest that building new reinforcers results in the new reinforcers displacing automatic reinforcers for stereotypy for some children, since the newly conditioned reinforcers resulted in allocation of responding to the new reinforcers rather than the emission of stereotypy (Greer et al., 1985; Nuzzolo-Gomez, et al., 2002). Other experiments have treated the acquisition of conditioned reinforcement as an independent variable. This research has built upon the foundation of stimulus-stimulus pairing, using the procedure to induce conditioned reinforcers for observing responses that are related to instruction. These studies reported accelerated rates of learning of tasks that involved visual and textual stimuli (Pereira-Delgado et al., 2009; Tsai & Greer, 2006) and discriminated responding in pigeons (Dinsmoor, 1983) as a function of acquisition of conditioned reinforcers for related observing responses. In these experiments, the acquisition of conditioned reinforcers was the independent variable (i.e., the stimulus-stimulus procedures was a means to induce conditioned reinforcers), and the effects of newly conditioned reinforcers for observing responses on rates of learning served as the dependent variable. According to verbal behavior developmental theory, when the cusp of phonemic control is missing, the child lacks basic listener literacy (Greer, Chavez-Brown et al., 2005). Basic listener literacy or phonemic awareness is defined as responding discriminatively to two or more different vowel-consonant combinations (Crystal, 2006). Greer et al. demonstrated that eight children who lacked the basic listener cusp (i.e., the children did not respond accurately to vocal instructions) could be taught to do so in a procedure that involved an intensive immersion in listener instruction. However, for this protocol or instruction in listener responding to be successful, it is possible that voices, as conditioned reinforcers need to be present. We tested whether the acquisition of voices as conditioned reinforcers would result in increases in observation of others, accelerate learning of educational goals that require listener responding, and increase choosing to listen to stories in a free play setting.