Establishment of exclusion responding in children with autism spectrum disorder
Repeated exclusion trials with prompting and reinforcement taught most autistic children to match sounds to pictures and use the skill with new photos.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Sivaraman and team worked with four autistic children who could not yet match sounds to pictures. They ran an exclusion package: many exclusion trials, gentle prompts, and lots of praise for correct picks.
Each trial played a spoken word like 'apple.' Five pictures appeared. Only one was new. The child had to pick the new one to 'exclude' the known items. Repeating this taught the sound-picture link.
What they found
Three of the four children learned the sound-picture pairs. When new pictures showed up, those three still picked correctly. Generalization happened.
Only one child could later say the name of a new picture just by hearing its sound. Naming by exclusion was rare in this group.
How this fits with other research
WMruzek et al. (2019) got the same goal with a different recipe. They swapped exclusion trials for echoic and identity-match prompts plus delayed fading. Both studies ended with kids who could listen and point correctly.
Zhou et al. (2025) now shows a faster way. They added a self-echoic step: the child repeats the sound before picking. Their joint-control method beat traditional conditional drills head-to-head. The 2025 paper supersedes the 2018 package for speed.
Belisle et al. (2023) took the basic sound-picture skill and built higher. After kids could match, they taught same/different and category relations. The 2018 work is a first step; 2023 shows where you can go next.
Why it matters
If a child is stuck at the listener-selection level, run exclusion trials with prompts and praise. Most kids will master sound-to-picture links and use them with new photos. Once that clicks, consider moving to joint-control prompts for even faster gains or to relational-frame lessons to build advanced language.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study aimed to teach auditory–visual relations using exclusion training and test the emergence of exclusion responding in novel relations and naming by exclusion in four participants diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. The treatment package consisted of multiple exposures to exclusion trials, prompting, and reinforcement. Four types of matching‐to‐sample trials (baseline, control, exclusion, and probe trials) and naming trials were used during the study. The auditory–visual matching to sample responses and naming responses of the new stimuli was tested. Three out of four participants demonstrated positive learning outcomes with the auditory–visual relations that were taught. One out of four participants demonstrated naming by exclusion. Posttest results show that exclusion responses generalized to stimuli used beyond training for the three successful participants. The results indicate that the treatment package can likely be an important teaching technology to establish exclusion responding.
Behavioral Interventions, 2018 · doi:10.1002/bin.1647