Abstract
Children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) may exhibit difficulties to learn cognitive skills, such as categorizing stimuli of different levels of complexity. Previous research has shown that children with ASD may correctly categorize visual stimuli after learning to emit speaker (tact) and listener behavior towards these stimuli using common category names. The present study was designed to extend the findings obtained by those studies and verify whether tact training would lead to the emergence of categorization and listener behavior. Four children diagnosed with ASD (7 and 10-years old) participated in the study. A nonconcurrent multiple baseline design across two children was used to evaluate the effects of tact training on the emergence of categorization and listener behavior. Participants were initially exposed to a pretraining with familiar pictures corresponding to three different categories (toys, clothes, and fruits). After the pretraining, they were taught to tact the category of nine pictures belonging to three different stimulus classes (hound dog, work dog, and toy dog) through a progressive prompt delay procedure. Next, we tested to see whether participants would match the pictures by category and emit the corresponding listener behavior. Two different categorization tests were administered. During the first test, participants had to look at the sample before selecting the corresponding comparisons. In the second test, they were instructed to tact the sample before selecting the comparisons. All participants learned to tact the pictures with few errors. They also categorized and emitted listener behavior. Results replicated those obtained by previous studies and suggest that tact training may produce categorization and listener behavior in children with ASD. They also support clinical recommendations for promoting categorization through tact training with participants who demonstrate transfer from speaker to listener behavior.