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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Applied Behavior Analysis

Western Michigan University

Masters Theses

Automatic reinforcement

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

A Comparison Of Two Variations Of A Stimulus-Stimulus Pairing Procedure On Novel And Infrequent Vocalizations Of Children With Autism, Andrew J. Bulla Aug 2014

A Comparison Of Two Variations Of A Stimulus-Stimulus Pairing Procedure On Novel And Infrequent Vocalizations Of Children With Autism, Andrew J. Bulla

Masters Theses

Despite the growth in a behavioral technology for the treatment of autism, a small population of individuals with autism fails to develop functional language. One procedure used for inducing vocalizations in non-verbal children is a stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP) procedure. In an SSP procedure a vocalization is paired with a reinforcer over a period of time to establish the vocalization as a learned reinforcer, and any utterance of the target vocalization is believed to be automatically reinforced thus increasing the frequency of the vocalization. Past research has yielded mixed results with the SSP procedure, and more research is warranted to identify …