Title: Establishing the Correspondence between Listening to One’s Own Voice and Doing in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
Description: Before the acquisition of speaker-as-own-listener (SOL) where individuals demonstrate verbal governance of their own overt and covert behavior (Skinner, 1957), individuals have to have the correspondence between listening to one’s own voice and doing, which I name self-listening. Self-listening is defined as the correspondence between listening to one’s own voice and doing in two forms: listening to one’s own voice and doing in isolation, and joining of print with listening to one’s own voice after reading aloud and doing. I conducted two experiments to investigate the establishment of self-listening in children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. I evaluated two different topographies of the target behavior: listen-to-own-voice-do (LOVD), which is defined as the correspondence between listening to one’s own voice and doing in isolation, and read-aloud-do (RAD), which is defined as the correspondence between reading aloud and doing. As Skinner (1957) explained, reading is an extension of listening.

When individuals are reading, they see print, say print, and then hear themselves. For that reason, listening to one’s own voice was targeted as one dependent variable and reading aloud as a second to compare the participants’ performance on both topographies accurately, as RAD includes both a listening and a reading component, while LOVD includes a listening component only. Using a multiple probe design across participants, I analyzed the participants’ performance in the two different topographies, LOVD and RAD, across two different tasks: a drawing task and a building task. The participants had to follow written directions in RAD and spoken directions in LOVD to produce a drawing in the drawing task and a construction in the building task. The dependent variables were identical across Experiments I and II, but varied in terms of the measurement system for the building task. In Experiment I, the intervention was listener instruction and in Experiment II the intervention was listener and reader instruction, in which I utilized the learn unit (Albers & Greer, 1991) in presenting the instruction and consequating the participants’ correct and incorrect responses.

The intervention in both experiments was presented in the form of a treasure hunt where the participants had to complete a 20-step treasure hunt accurately to earn a desired reinforcer. The results of both experiments showed that the dependent variables, LOVD and RAD, were established across all participants. There were limitations in Experiment I, which were addressed in Experiment II. Keywords: self-listener, self-listening, listening, following instructions, spoken instructions, written instructions, joining of print, say-do correspondence, speaker-as-own-listener, listen-do correspondence, read-do correspondence, reading comprehension, listening comprehension.