Teaching children with autism spectrum disorder to tact auditory stimuli: A replication
Pair sounds with pictures when teaching auditory tacts—kids master the names faster and with fewer errors.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Bergmann et al. (2023) worked with two children with autism.
They wanted to teach the kids to name sounds like a dog bark or phone ring.
The team tried three ways: sound alone, sound plus a known picture, and sound plus a new picture.
They used a multiple-baseline design across sounds.
What they found
Both kids learned the sound names fastest when a picture was paired with the sound.
Sound-only trials sometimes failed or confused the child.
Compound cues kept learning smooth and steady.
How this fits with other research
Hanney et al. (2019) ran the same comparison and got the same result.
Their data also showed that mixing in old object-name trials stopped new sounds from messing up old picture names.
Ruffo et al. (2025) later copied the idea for touch names and again found compound cues won.
Vedora et al. (2015) once saw no big gap between single and paired cues, but they taught receptive words to toddlers, not auditory tacts to older kids, so age and skill explain the gap.
Why it matters
If you are teaching a child to label sounds, always show a matching picture at the start.
Fade the picture later if you want, but begin with the pair.
This small tweak can save you weeks of trial time and keeps stimulus control clean.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
AbstractIt is important that tacts are controlled by stimuli across all senses but teaching tacts to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often limited to visual stimuli. This study replicated and extended a study on the effects of antecedent‐stimulus presentations on the acquisition of auditory tacts. We used a concurrent multiple probe across sets design and an embedded adapted alternating treatments design to evaluate acquisition of auditory tacts when auditory stimuli were presented alone (i.e., isolated) or with corresponding pictures (i.e., compound‐with‐known and compound‐with‐unknown) with two school‐aged boys with ASD. Both participants' responding met the mastery criterion no matter the stimulus presentation with at least one set, but one participant failed to acquire one set of stimuli in the isolated condition. The isolated condition was rarely the most efficient. We conducted post‐training stimulus‐control probes, and we observed disrupted stimulus control in the isolated condition for one participant. Implications for arranging auditory tacts instruction are discussed.
Behavioral Interventions, 2023 · doi:10.1002/bin.1936