Abstract
The purpose of the current study was to examine the role of listener training in the development of naming (the transfer from speaker to listener behavior and vice versa) and novel categorization on children diagnosed with autism. Participants included two girls, five and four years of age, and two boys both five years of age, diagnosed with autism. The effects of listener training were evaluated using a non-concurrent multiple-baseline across participants design. Three of the children, who did not categorize or emit the speaker behavior (tacts) correctly during pretraining were able to do so during posttraining probes. After acquiring the listener behavior, the fourth participant required that the tact be trained directly in order to categorize the stimuli. These results suggest that listener training alone may be an efficient way to produce novel categorization in some children diagnosed with autism, and that naming plays a crucial role in doing so.