The modification and generalization of voice loudness in a fifteen-year-old retarded girl.
A voice-activated token dispenser can jack up vocal loudness in withdrawn teens, but you must keep the pay rule alive in every setting or the voice drops back to a whisper.
01Research in Context
What this study did
A 15-year-old girl with intellectual disability rarely spoke above a whisper.
Researchers built a small voice meter. When her volume crossed a set line, she earned a token. Tokens bought snacks and trinkets.
Sessions ran in a quiet lab first, then in her classroom with extra rules.
What they found
Tokens quickly made her voice louder in the lab. The gain held when the meter moved to a new corner of the same room.
In her real classroom, loudness dropped again. Only when teachers also paid tokens for volume did she speak up there.
How this fits with other research
Scull et al. (1973) used tokens plus delayed auditory feedback to cut stuttering in adults. Both studies show the same tool—token pay—can shape very different parts of speech.
Lydersen et al. (1974) found that paying grade-school boys for accurate reading erased their disruptions. Like the girl here, the kids only kept the gain while the pay plan stayed in place.
Tracey et al. (1974) tried to shape positive talk in adult psychiatric patients. Praise for talking about activities worked, but praise for talking about people did not carry over. The girl’s loudness also stuck only where tokens still paid, echoing the spotty generalization seen in that ward study.
Rapport et al. (1982) later showed adolescents could earn tokens for giving praise while tutoring. Academic gains spread to both tutor and tutee, proving peer-delivered tokens can still broaden impact when the social context is engineered right.
Why it matters
If you need a quiet teen to speak up, an automated token meter works fast. Plan from day one to weave the same pay rule into the natural setting—otherwise the voice will fade the moment the device leaves. Pair the gadget with teacher-delivered tokens or peer-mediated praise to lock in the gain where it counts.
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Join Free →Tape a sound-level app to a tablet, set it to ding at the target dB, and hand a token each time it beeps—then loop the teacher into the same pay rule before lunch.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
A fifteen-year-old severely disturbed girl was treated for aphonia. Because of the extent of her withdrawal, the subject was conditioned in a laboratory setting and received tokens for speaking loudly enough to operate a voice-operated relay. Conditioning at first consisted of saying 100 monosyllabic words, with the possibility of reinforcement on each word. Later, the subject was required to say a polysyllabic word, and finally, five or six words per token. The subject was shaped to speak with normal loudness in the laboratory, and generalization to a reading situation in the laboratory was measured and observed to occur, at first for a few minutes, and later for a longer period. Generalization to a reading situation in the classroom did not occur, but the subject's voice loudness also increased in the classroom when several new reinforcement contingencies were put into effect there.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1974 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1974.7-461