Combining physical and auditory modeling prompts, time delay, rehearsal, and reinforcement produces acquisition and generalization of vocal and motor empathy skills in four young children with autism1

摘要

Design: A multiple-baseline design across subjects with continuous generalization probes to novel stimuli, and multiple pre-, within- and postgener-alization probes to people and settings for empathy responses related to displays of sadness or pain for four participants, and a multiple-baseline design across behaviors (three response categories) with generalization probes to novel stimuli, people, and settings for one participant who was included in the above multiple-baseline design. Allocation: Each participant received the same conditions and treatment for the sadness or pain response category, with the exception of the first participant, who received the same conditions and treatment across three response categories, including sadness or pain, happiness or excitement, and frustration. For the multiple-baseline design across subjects, the participants were allocated to the tiers in the descending order of their receptive and expressive scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (3rd ed., PPVT-III; Dunn, & Dunn, 1997) and on the Expressive Vocabulary Test (EVT; Williams, 1997). Specifically, the participant with the highest scores received the intervention first, and the participant with the lowest scores received the intervention last.