Ampliação do repertório verbal de quatro bebês: ensino de ecóico, relação auditivo-visual e tato

Abstract

The present study undertakes teaching tactile response to four infants, ages 26-29 months, with limited exposure to verbal stimulation. The decision to teach tact response is based on the concept that it is one of the most important categories of verbal operants, therefore, a strong aspect of their control is dependent upon the antecedent stimulation in the physical environment. By controlling the child s antecedent environmental stimuli, she then has a wide variety of circumstances for learning, and, as a result, can enhance her verbal repertoire. In order to verify whether tact learning could enhance conditional discrimination learning, a pairing procedure Matching to Sample Auditory-Visual (MTS) was used as a measure of discrimination learning, plus interlaced tact training. In this manner, two teaching procedures were performed: teaching of vocal tact and MTS. Two babies began training with vocal tact, and two begain with MTS. The tact training consisted of instruction/commands by an adult as a condition for the issuance by the baby of: echoics, selective responses and vocal tact responses. The results indicated that the cumulative curves for solicitation of echoics and selection by the researcher and the corresponding curves for the correct responses by the children had gradual positive acceleration. The performance curves of each of the babies, relative to tact, presented a more accentuated curve relative to the cumulative curves for tact requests by the researchers. The data suggest that the teaching of tact response to the tact command can be considered the more exigent task, compared to the demands of echoic and response selection, ahead of vocalization of the object s name. The results warrant discussion of the concomitance of learning echoic response and selection of objects upon vocalization of the name. The outcome of the MTS is that the four participants achieved the learning criterion for the discrimination of presented stimuli. In the statistical analysis of the correlation between percentage of hits with MTS and the percentage of correct responses in the three tact teaching situations, the results indicate that three of the four participants had a directly proportional relative increase between the MTS correct responses and selection solicitation correct responses. For just one participant, the statistical analysis indicated an higher correlation between the tact solicitation correct responses and MTS correct responses, however, this participant required a greater degree of behavioral listener-speaker training with familiar objects. The teaching method used, which interlaced tact training with MTS was as effective for teaching vocal tact as for teaching conditional discrimination.