Query: intensive tact

title: Effect of Intensive Tact Instruction on Spontaneous Verbal Behavior in Three Children with Developmental Disability

title: The effects of intensive tact instruction with young children having speech delays on pure tacts and mands in non instructional settings: a partial replication
abstract: the present study is a partial replication of the intensive tact instruction tactic. Previous applications of this tactic have demonstrated improvements in the pure verbal operant behaviors of preschool students with autism and speech delays and in middle school students with special needs (Pistoljevic greer, 2006) t acts, mands, and conversational units have been increased across three non instructional settings nis) before and after the mastery of five categories of pictures using 100 tact learn units. the participants in the present study included two boys and one girl with autism who ranged in age from six to nine years old and attended a private school in h ong Kong. the experimental design was a delayed multiple probe design across participants. All probe sessions were conducted for a cumulative time of 15 minutes including five minutes in each of the three nis. All three students were observed to emit significantly more tacts after mastering the 100 learn units through the intensive tact instruction. there were collateral effects observed in the number of mands emitted for two of the three students. the present study adds to the external validity of the intensive tact instruction tactic with an older age range of students.

title: Implementing intensive tact instruction to increase frequency of spontaneous mands and tacts in typically developing children
abstract: the present study explored the effects of a modified, intensive tact instruction intervention on the emission of spontaneous, or unprompted, mands and tacts during play in two typically developing, preschool siblings. intensive tact instruction involved presenting each participant 100 opportunities per session to tact stimuli prior to engaging in play. Picture cards were used as the tacting stimuli, which varied across five categories and five sets. Participants were reinforced for correct tacting responses or were conversely corrected for inaccurate or omitted responses. When compared to baseline, both participants exhibited increase in spontaneous tacts following such instruction. mands only increased slightly for one participant. this study adds to the research on the positive effect of using intensive tact instruction to help typically developing yet linguistically diverse children communicate.

title: The Effects of Intensive Tact Instruction on the Emergence of Vocal Verbal Operants in Non Instructional Settings for Elementary School Students with ASD
abstract: bon yeongueseoneun taegteujibjunghunryeon(Intensive Tact Instruction, ITI)i japyeseupegteureomjangaereul gajin adongi boineun jeogjeolhan eumseongeoneojagdonghaengdonge micineun yeonghyange daehayeo bunseoghayeossda. migug teugsuhaggeube baecidoen codeunghagsaeng 3myeongi bon silheome camgahayeosseumyeo 1myeongyi man 7se yeohagsaenggwa 2myeongyi man 7se namhagsaengeuro silheomcamgajaga guseongdoeeossda. danildaesangyeonguseolgyebeob junge hanain.

title: The Effects of Intensive Tact Instruction on the Emergence of Vocal Verbal Operants in Non Instructional Settings for Elementary School Students with ASD

title: Generic instruction versus intensive tact instruction and the emission of spontaneous speech.
abstract: The expansion of the tact repertoire appears to be critical to the acquisition of subsequent and more complex verbal developmental stages. It is likely that direct instruction in tacts must continue until children have acquired the verbal developmental cusp of Naming, which is defined as the capability to acquire the listener and speaker responses to stimuli incidentally (Greer Speckman, 2009; Greer, Stolfi, Pistoljevic, 2007; Horne Lowe, 1996; Pistoljevic Greer, 2006; Skinner, 1957) Skinner (1957) described six elementary verbal functions for the speaker, including (1) echoics, (2) mands, (3) tacts, (4) autoclitics, (5) intraverbals, and (6) textual responding. For the purposes of this study, we focus primarily on mands, tacts, and intraverbals. Mands are speaker or substitute speaking topographies that are emitted under conditions of deprivation or annoying conditions in the presence of a listener who then mediates the environment for the speaker (Skinner, 1957; Greer Ross, 2008) Tacts are verbal operants occasioned by a discriminative stimulus in the environment and are reinforced by generalized reinforcers particularly attention (Tsiouri Greer, 2003) Children with autism usually demonstrate deficits in functional communication (DSM IV, American Psychiatric Association, 1994) including tacts. For example, children with autism typically do not emit language without prompting or questioning by others and thus demonstrate few instances of "spontaneous speech" (Krantz McClannahan, 1998) For this reason, studies have focused on the development of verbal skills by these children. Partington, Sundberg, Newhouse, Spengler (1994) implemented a procedure for transferring stimulus control from verbal stimuli to nonverbal stimuli in a six year old girl with autism. As a result, the girl acquired tact responses to 19 stimuli. Partington et al. then proposed that the reason for the failure of children with autism to acquire tacts may be tied to the antecedent verbal behavior of others (e.g. "What is that?" which functions to block the establishment of stimulus control by a nonverbal stimulus. This observation is consistent with findings reported by Williams and Greer (1993) Several evidence based protocols are available for inducing echoics and then mand and tact responses for children who have no, or limited, vocal verbal operants. Included here are (1) the stimulus stimulus pairing procedure to induce echoics (Sundberg, Michael, Partington, Sundberg, 1996) (2) rapid motor imitation to induce echoics to mand and echoics to tact functions (Ross Greer, 2003; Tsiouri, Greer, 2003) and (3) direct echoic to mand and echoic to tact instruction (Williams Greer, 1993) Procedures are also available to expand repertoires such as speaker immersion (Greer Ross, 2004; Ross, Nuzzolo, Stolfi, Natarelli, 2006; Schwartz, 1994) However, once repertoires are established, children need extensive instruction in order to expand their language functions or verbal repertoires. The primary repertoire in need of expansion is the tact repertoire because tacts are foundational to the subsequent development of more complex verbal behavior such as Naming, say do correspondence, conversational units, and age appropriate self talk (Barnes Holmes, Barnes Holmes, Cullinan, 2000; Greer Ross, 2008; Greer Speckman, 2009; Horne Lowe, 1996) Several recent investigations suggested the importance of directly and intensely teaching the tact repertoire, especially for those children who cannot acquire tacts through spontaneous observational learning (Williams Greer, 1993;  2003; Schauffler, Greer, 2006; Tsiouri Greer, 2003; Pistoljevic Greer, 2006; Pistoljevic, 2008) The protocol used in these studies is referred to as the intensive tact procedure (ITP)

title: The effects of intensive tact training on the emission of tacts across settings

title: The Effects of Intensive Tact Instruction on Three Verbal Operants in Non Instructional Settings for Two Children with Autism
abstract: It is estimated that only one half of children with autism and related disorders will acquire any speech as a mode of communication () Thus, a frequent need among children with autism is assistance in acquiring and developing effective communication skills (Scheips, Reid, Behrmenn, Sutton, 1998) Typically, a child with autism in the presence of a nonverbal cue will rarely emit a spontaneous initiation. The child will remain silent and speak only when verbally prompted by another person providing a question or a command (Ingenmey Van Houten, 1991) However, much of daily communication is not verbally prompted. Thus, it is important to teach children to tact (label) objects or events under non verbal antecedent control (Greer, Ross, 2008; Matson, Sevin, Box, Francis, Sevin, 1993; Williams, Carnerero, Perez Gonzalez, 2006) to support the emergence of unprompted speech and spontaneous initiation. Research conducted by Hart Risley (1995) found that deficits in the development of a speaker repertoire may be the product of nature or environmental factors. Their research found that children from low socioeconomic families frequently displayed deficits in verbal repertoires on entering school. The authors noted that there were significantly fewer verbal interactions emitted among children and parents in families with low levels of socioeconomic status as compared to professional families with high levels of socioeconomic status, and that verbal interactions in families that were defined as working class fell somewhere in the middle. Additionally, professional families had far more positive verbal interactions than families in either of the two other categories. The results of the study suggest that young children who have significantly fewer verbal interactions with their parents are more likely to have language delays and vocabu laries that increase at a much slower rate than children who have high numbers of positive verbal interactions with their parents. We propose that children with native language disabilities have infrequent language experiences as well, and as a result lack certain verbal developmental capabilities that are foundational to the development of language (Keohane, Pereira Delgado Greer, in press) Intensive language experiences are necessary to remediate such deficits whatever the underlying cause (Greer, Keohane, 2005; Greer, Ross, 2008; Pistoljevic Greer, 2006) Communication training using intensive behavioral interventions has been a key focus of instruction for children with autism who present with deficits in their listener and speaker repertoires. Communication training involves teaching the vocal operants mands and tacts, with a view to increasing spontaneous speech emitted by the child (Pereira Delgado, Oblak, 2007; Pistoljevic Greer, 2006; Schauffler Greer, 2006) A tact is evoked by a nonverbal discriminative stimulus such as an object or event, or the relation between objects or events, and is maintained by generalised or social reinforcers (Skinner, 1957) In contrast, a mand specifies its reinforcer, is evoked by an establishing operation (EO) such as deprivation or aversive stimulation, and is maintained by specific consequences relevant to that EO (Michael, 1988) According to Skinner (1957) each verbal operant is acquired independently and serves a different function. Establishing one operant will not automatically result in the appearance of another. For example, when an utterance is established as a tact it does not automatically follow that the utterance emergences as a mand. Skinner's theoretical analysis is supported by numerous research studies on the topic (Hall Sundberg, 1987; Lamarre Holland, 1985; Nuzzolo Gomez Greer, 2004; Sundberg, San Juan, Dawdy, Arguelles, 1990; Twyman, 1995) Skinner characterised spontaneous verbal initiations as pure mands and pure tacts (i.

title: The effects of multiple exemplar and intensive tact instruction on the acquisition of Naming in preschoolers diagnosed with autism and other language delays

title: The Effects of Daily Intensive Tact Instruction on the Emission of Pure Mands and Tacts in Non Instructional Settings by Three Preschool Children with Developmental Delays.
abstract: We tested the effects of an intensive tact instruction procedure on the emission of verbal operants in non instructional settings by three preschool students with developmental delays. The participants were selected because they emitted low numbers pure verbal operants in non instructional settings throughout the school day. Specifically, we measured the number of pure mands and tacts emitted during probes in the non instructional settings. During the intensive tact procedure, the participants received an additional 100 tacts above their average number of daily learn units. In a delayed multiple probe design, we found that the intensive tact instruction was effective in increasing the number of pure mands and tacts emitted in the non instructional settings by all three of the participants in the study.  Tacts, Mands, Learn units. The development of a fluent speaker repertoire is critical for young children with language delays. Students with a fluent speaker repertoire use an extensive vocabulary across settings and overtime, extrapolate new vocabulary based on existing vocabulary and are reinforced naturally by communicative behavior (Hart Risley, 1996) Furthermore, students who function as "speakers" can govern consequences in the presence of "listeners" in their environment by using another individual to mediate the contingencies (Greer, 2002) Deficits in the development of a speaker repertoire may be attributed to native or environmental factors. The latter was demonstrated by Hart Risley (1995) who found a correlation between SES and vocabulary growth, where 3 year old children from families categorized as low SES had acquired approximately half the vocabulary compared with children from higher SES or professional families. These findings were attributed to overall language interactions between parents and their children, in which parents of high SES used a vocabulary of over 2000 different words versus 1000 words used by parents of low SES. Additionally, the low SES children experienced infrequent opportunities for interactions, which placed these children at risk for failure in future languagelearning opportunities. Students that present with deficits in their speaker repertoire often receive intense behavioral interventions that provide opportunities for compensation. This instruction involves teaching the vocal operants mands and tacts. According to Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior (1957) mands and tacts are two of the functional relations in terms of their controlling antecedent and consequent events. Children typically learn tacts through direct instruction, naming or via observation if the student has an observational learning repertoire. The term "tact," is derived from "contact" with one's own environment, and can represent aspects of an individuals' environment across all five senses: taste, smell, sound, touch and sight (Greer Ross, 2006) More specifically, a tact is a vocal verbal operant that is under non verbal control and is reinforced by a generalized reinforcer (Skinner, 1957; Becker, 1989) In this case a generalized reinforcer would be the attention of another person. For example, a child may emit the tact car with a vocal response "car" in the presence of an actual car and the child's mother may respond "that is a red car." In this case the mother's response functioned to reinforce the child's initial tact. This then increases the likelihood that the child would emit further tacts in the future. Skinner (1957) differentiated between two different types of tacts; pure and intraverbal tacts, where an intraverbal or impure tact occurs under multiple controlling antecedents, which are both verbal and physical. At times during direct instruction students are required to emit impure tacts where the teacher points to a stimulus and as part of the antecedent and may ask "What is it?" Typically, children are learning the form and the correspondence between the stimulus and the word during instruction under the antecedent control of both a verbal stimulus and a nonverbal stimulus.