A lot of children with autism or signs of autism get stuck when it comes to learning
receptive language abilities, such as touching body parts or touching, uh, touch banana out
of several pictures in the field.
Learning receptive language, I got a lot of really great advice over the past two decades
from Dr. Mark Sundberg.
So today we're talking about some key lessons from Dr. Sundberg in teaching receptive language
skills.
Hi, I'm Dr. Mary Barbera, autism mom, Board Certified Behavior Analyst, and bestselling
author.
Each week I provide you with some of my ideas about turning autism or signs of autism around,
so if you haven't subscribed to my YouTube channel, you can do that now.
A while back I did a Turn Autism Around podcast interview with Dr. Mark Sundberg, and he does
a really nice job, uh, in this interview, specifically breaking down how to teach receptive
language, what to do if you're stuck, and also, uh, talks about the idea of using multiple
control.
So this video blog, we are just sharing a small portion of that great interview with
Dr. Mark Sundberg.
Now the difference between, you know, a really in my, using kind of my approach from all
of this information that I've gathered over the past two decades, as a registered nurse,
as an autism mom, as a mom of a typical son, as a behavior analyst, as an author is, I
think what's missing in a lot of ABA programs that aren't using, utilizing BF Skinner's
approach enough is, is lack of attention to multiple control and lack of attention to
transfer trials, um, and errorless teaching and kind of blaming the student for lack of
progress.
Like I see that as being really critical and I want to bring up this, this, um, I just
actually did a podcast, it'll be podcast number 51, and it's on the five areas where parents
and professionals get stuck.
And so we've talked about a couple of them already.
So the number, the number one area is taking kids from nonvocal to vocal, getting them
talking, or getting them saying sounds or getting echoic control like that's an area
where kids get stuck.
And the number two area is receptive, receptive ID, so that’s like understanding, touch
your body parts, or touch the banana in a field of three.
Um, and, uh, you know, I've seen, I've seen young kids stuck with receptive.
I've seen 16-year-olds with no receptive language.
It's like, how do you get to be 16 years old and no receptive language?
And I remember way back with the Verbal Behavior Project, which is where I first met you, where,
you know, um, I was the lead behavior analyst from 2003 to 2010, you were like a consultant
for the project.
I remember you coming in and we did case studies one afternoon.
And so we presented this kid, I think he was about 8 or 10 years of age.
He had just transferred into a classroom.
And we had videos of him and we showed them to you.
And I remember he had like no receptive language to speak up.
He had PICA, he had all these issues, right.
So I had the teacher at the time holding up 2, well, she was holding up 2 cards and she
was saying, touch ball, and he was just touching either one.
And I mean, you gave us a lot of advice on, on the whole picture too.
But I remember specifically like having this major aha moment, it kind of changed the whole
way I was programming for kids, but you said 2 things.
You said stop having them hold it up.
She doesn't even have any, any hands to prompt him with, which totally makes sense.
Right?
Like, duh.
So we started putting a lot more things on the table.
And then the second thing that you said, which was, again, just a huge aha, is in order to
get receptive ID, you really have to have strong matching and scanning.
And the way you build scanning is through matching, not through receptive ID.
And, and so, a lot of my programs now in my online courses and the way I teach is, is
to use multiple control.
So on the probe sheet, it might be touch head with an imitative prompt and then use a transfer
trial to try to shape that down and get rid of that prompt.
But, um, so just in general, like you, you have given me really great advice on, you
know, do you have anything to add in terms of, like your procedures for really getting
matching strong in that case.
Um, also getting, um, imitation strong, imitation strong for the body parts and commands and
matching strong for the receptive ID, I think is just huge.
Well, uh, maybe let's, let's talk for a minute about multiple control and, uh, tie that in
and see how that, that connects to all of this.
Uh, multiple control basically involves where 2 or more antecedents might control a response.
So we're all, we're all familiar with using an echoic prompt that is, I pulled up a pen
and say pen.
And now there, we would say I've got a vocal SD and a visual SD.
I might also have a motivating operation at strength.
That is the child wants the pen to write something if I had something a little bit more fun.
Uh, so it may be that those 3 sources of control get the child to respond.
That they can respond under the circumstances of seeing the item, wanting the item, and
hearing the word.
That may be easy, but yet it allows you to evoke that word.
So I got a, I got a response now that I can do something with, I can reinforce it.
Now, my task is to transfer control, as you have mentioned.
Usually, it's the echoic, in that example, that gives away what the child should say,
say pen.
And I know that if I just hold up the pen, I don't get anything, even though they might
want it and try and grab it.
It's the echoic that is the source, primary source of control.
But yet these are secondary sources.
My task is to make this the primary SD.
So that means I've got to transfer control from echoic to the tact, to the object.
So that whole concept of transfer stimulus control is really the core of what we do hands-on
with kids.
We're giving them lots of them prompts, so they're successful, but the key is to fade
out the prompt.
And as that applied to the listener discrimination procedure, as you had suggested, uh, in, in
a listener task, when I say touch pan, as you had mentioned, what the individual needs
to do is scan the array, uh, and then emit some kind of response indicating the pen.
But the tricky part is that the source of control is a spoken word pen, or shoe or car
and verbal stimulus control is often very difficult to acquire over kids in that, uh,
over kids, verbal behavior.
And that is obvious in, for example, the intraverbal relation.
It's hard to get kids to respond, to tell me a big animal that likes to swim.
Uh, there's a lot of parts to words.
And it's hard for kids often to learn, to take those words and, and, uh, have some correspondence
with the physical environment.
That is what you say goes along with what I'm looking at or what I'm seeing.
So the procedure you described was simply establishing a skill.
If we look at matching to sample, and if I, if I show you, if I show you a pen, And I
want you to match one of these, a lot of kids can easily do that.
That's often not very hard to do is establish that under the control of this pen, I can
now match it to this pen.
That is I can scan an array and I can select.
That's the exact behavior that we're after in a listener discrimination that is, touch
pen, the child touches pen.
The only difference is I got a second stimulus present.
There's our multiple control.
So now I say pen, when I'm showing the pen and, uh, in a sense, all the child's still
doing is matching to sample.
Uh, they're, they're just identifying, uh, you know, in a matching framework.
My task is to get rid of this pen and transfer stimulus control to touch pen.
And there are a variety of procedural ways to do that.
We began to call that the blank card procedure, because we'd have, for example, if this had
a picture of a pen on it, uh, would use that as a prompt.
I’d say find pen and the child would match to sample.
Then we'd gradually put our hand over it or do it quickly find pen, find pen and pretty
soon transfer control from the picture to the word.
And that's all the procedure was, was if you're able to do it with a visual stimulus, now
I got to teach you to do it with a verbal stimulus.
And it turns out that it wasn't so hard to do.
So that was always fun then to see kids now get it correctly, even though they're looking
at this blank card and what we ended up figuring, figuring out was the blank card was almost
a prompt to scan the array.
When they saw the blank card, they looked for stuff, and then eventually faded out the
blank part.
So it's those little procedures, but, uh, uh, it's that kind of detail, I think, that
gets us, uh, through barriers that kids struggle with often for years.
Yeah.
And I think it's, um, you know, it's one of the, I think, a lot of well, meaning professionals
who are running ABA programs, whether you want to call it VB or not, or whatever you
were going to call it, if you're missing the analysis of multiple control and transfer
procedures, I think that's a lot of the crooks of the issues.
Um, I know Rick Kubina and I published in 2005 a study, which we can link in the show
notes here, uh, uh, I can't remember the name, uh, Using Transfer Procedures to Teach Tacts
to a Child with Autism, it was Lucas was in the study and, um, he helped me.
Rick Kubina was my mentor.
And I did a podcast episode with Rick, I think we talked about that study more in-depth,
but up until that point, like your, your teaching language book really recommended a lot of,
uh, echoic to tact trials.
But for Lucas, because I think of his strong Lovaas ABA background, where receptive was
just like gold.
Right?
Was just taught.
His receptive on his ABLLS at the time, because there was no VB MAPP at that point, his receptive
column was a lot higher than his tact.
And what I found with his particular profile is if I gave it to him in a receptive to tact
format, it was almost like multiple choice.
And then, you know, based on that study, there were a lot more studies that were done after
that.
And so I'm constantly, within my procedures, within my online, I'm constantly like multiple
control, multiple control, you know, like, um, blasting the matching, blasting the imitation
and, and blasting the multiple control.
So you're, you're, instead of match, you're saying pen, um, as they're matching and you're
transferring it right away and we're just having a ton of success.
So thank you for that explanation.
And thank you for all of what you've taught me over the years.
Um, I feel like when I'm in your presence, you like have so much knowledge, so it's,
it's just awesome.
I hope you enjoyed that interview and listening to Dr. Mark Sandberg's advice and insights.
If you want to watch the whole interview, you can go to marybarbera.com/53.
It is one of my favorite podcasts interviews, you can either listen to it as you're on the
go on Apple podcasts, just search for Turn Autism Around or if you go to my website marybarbera.com/53,
you'll get right to that, to that podcast interview that you can actually watch as well.
And if you're a parent or professional who needs more information about how to get unstuck,
I'd like to invite you to a free online workshop at marybarbera.com/workshop.
If you like this little video blog, I would love it if you would give me a thumbs up,
leave a comment, share with others, subscribe to my channel.
I hope to see you right here next week.