Matrix Training for Expanding the Communication of Toddlers and Preschoolers With Autism Spectrum Disorder
Teach a handful of noun-verb pairs and watch toddlers with autism create new ones for free.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with three toddlers who had autism. They picked six toys and six actions. They put them in a six-by-six grid.
They taught only the diagonal pairs, like "car drive" and "ball roll." Then they watched to see if the kids could say new pairs they had never been taught.
What they found
Every child learned the taught pairs quickly. More important, they started saying new combos like "car bounce" and "doll drive" on their own.
The new phrases kept growing as the grid got bigger. The kids were mixing and matching like tiny sentence factories.
How this fits with other research
Marya et al. (2021) copied the same idea but gave the kids speech tablets. The tablets worked too, so the trick is not just spoken words.
Bailey et al. (2010) tried a similar grid with preschoolers, but some kids needed extra teaching. The toddlers in Jimenez-Gomez needed fewer extra steps.
McQuaid et al. (2024) moved the whole thing online. Two kids still made new combos, one needed a booster. The method travels well, even through a screen.
Why it matters
You can cut teaching time in half. Pick a small set of nouns and verbs, teach the diagonal, then probe for new mixes. If the child stalls, add a few more taught pairs and probe again. This keeps sessions short and fun while language blooms.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) typically exhibit a range of social communication deficits. Presequenced stimulus arrangements, such as matrix training, can be used to facilitate generative responding. Accordingly, training procedures can lead to the acquisition of a greater number of targets that are not taught explicitly, with fewer learning trials. Matrix training provides a useful framework for selecting teaching targets to promote the emergence of untaught skills. Participants were 3 young boys diagnosed with ASD, who were taught noun-verb combinations of play actions as tact and listener responses. All participants learned the taught noun-verb targets and showed varying degrees of recombinative generalization to untaught targets. Across subsequent matrices, the rate of acquisition of new targets and the number acquired without direct teaching increased (i.e., recombinative generalization). This suggests matrix training stimulus arrangements can facilitate the acquisition of novel targets by teaching young children with ASD to recombine language components appropriately.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2019 · doi:10.1007/s40617-019-00346-5