Contriving Deprivation Condition to Teach a Child with Autism to Request Missing Items Needed to Complete Tasks

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to test the effects of contriving motivational condition in a form of deprivation of an item on emergence of vocal request for the item. The participant of the study was a first grade boy with autism and language delays who attended to a public elementary school in a metropolitan area. A deprivation as a motivational condition was contrived by placing an item which was needed to complete a given activity within a sight but out of reach of the child. One activity was used to teach to request and three novel activities were used to test if the learned language skill was generalized within the novel activities. A prompt procedure was used. During the prompting, the investigator presented a vocal model of the name of the missing items when the participant reached to a step of the activity in which the missing item was needed. The prompt procedure was faded systematically. The participant learned to request the missing item with sessions and the skills was generalized across all three novel activities without additional instruction on the vocal requesting.