Using Transfer Trials to Teach Tacting to Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Three autistic kids learned new picture names in a tabletop DTT program.

The team ran two formats: one added a quick transfer trial after each error, the other stayed with classic three-step DTT.

Sessions were short—about 15 minutes—and mastery was set at 100 % correct across two consecutive sessions.

Both formats worked fast. Every child hit mastery in 2-4 sessions no matter which format they got first.

There was no speed edge for adding transfer trials; accuracy curves sat on top of each other.

Belisle et al. (2020) also taught tacts to autistic kids, but used most-to-least PEAK prompting instead of comparing trial formats. Their kids learned just as quickly, showing that several roads lead to fast tact gains.

Yanchik et al. (2024) looked at toddlers and found that mixing NET with DTT beat DTT alone for adaptive skills. They still kept DTT for kids who needed more structure, matching Dell’Aringa’s view that plain DTT is solid when the goal is simple tact acquisition.

Frampton et al. (2019) used matrix training to get emergent color-shape tacts without direct teaching. Their efficiency came from recombinative generalization, not from trial format tweaks—another reminder that speed can come from what you teach, not just how you deliver trials.

You can stop worrying about inserting extra transfer trials when you run tact programs. Pick the routine that feels smoother for you and the child; the learning rate will be the same. Save your planning time for targets, prompts, or generalization activities instead.

A transfer trial is a component of discrete-trial training. After a prompted trial, the therapist re-presents the original instruction and gives the learner a chance to respond without the prompt.

Its primary purpose is to transfer stimulus control: to shift the response from being controlled by the prompt to being controlled by the natural discriminative stimulus, such as a question or an object. This is why transfer trials are often recommended when teaching expressive language.

The study compared transfer trials with a nontransfer procedure for teaching two-component tacts to three children with autism. Both procedures were effective and efficient for all learners.

In other words, transfer trials did not clearly outpace the standard procedure for tact acquisition here, but they remained a sound, evidence-supported option within discrete-trial training. Practitioners can reasonably use either format.