Teaching children with autism spectrum disorder to tact auditory stimuli
Teach sound names with pictures, then fade; guard old tacts by mixing in object-name trials.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Two children with autism learned to name sounds. The team compared two ways to teach. One way used sound plus a picture. The other way used sound only.
They also watched for trouble. If the new sound names messed up old object names, they mixed in quick object-name trials to fix it.
What they found
Sound-plus-picture won. Both kids learned faster and cleaner. Sound-only often failed or created odd stimulus control.
When object names slipped, tossing in old object trials wiped out the mix-up.
How this fits with other research
Bergmann et al. (2023) ran the same study four years later and got the same win for compound cues. Their kids also hit mastery faster with pictures.
Ruffo et al. (2025) swapped touch for sound. They used compound cues and kids later named textures with eyes closed. Same tactic, new sense.
Porter et al. (2008) added taste, touch, and sniff to hear-see-say. Again, multisensory beat single-sense. The pattern holds across senses and labs.
Why it matters
If you run auditory tact programs, always pair the sound with a picture first. Drop to sound-only only after mastery. Watch for old tacts to wobble—just sprinkle in the original object-name trials. One small tweak saves you weeks of retraining.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Studies on teaching tacts to individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have primarily focused on visual stimuli, despite published clinical recommendations to teach tacts of stimuli in other sensory domains as well. In the current study, two children with ASD were taught to tact auditory stimuli under two stimulus-presentation arrangements: isolated (auditory stimuli presented without visual cues) and compound (auditory stimuli presented with visual cues). Results indicate that compound stimulus presentation was a more effective teaching procedure, but that it interfered with prior object-name tacts. A modified compound arrangement in which object-name tact trials were interspersed with auditory-stimulus trials mitigated this interference.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2019 · doi:10.1002/jaba.605