Multilingual Diversity in the Field of Applied Behavior Analysis and Autism: A Brief Review and Discussion of Future Directions
Brief your interpreter on the client’s verbal history or your reinforcement may miss the mark.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Wang et al. (2019) wrote a think-piece, not an experiment.
They used Skinner’s verbal-behavior ideas to map how meaning gets lost when an interpreter stands between you and the family.
The paper tells you to brief the interpreter on each client’s verbal history before every session.
What they found
The authors show that a word is only a word if speaker and listener share the same learning history.
When histories differ, the interpreter must bridge the gap or the wrong behavior gets reinforced.
How this fits with other research
Lim et al. (2018) came first and told clinicians to stop banning bilingual homes.
Wang et al. (2019) add the how: use an interpreter who knows the child’s past words.
Carrera et al. (2025) extend the idea into data. They run separate FAs in English and Spanish and find different functions in each language.
Kim et al. (2024) seem to clash. Their big review says US systems still push English-only. The gap is real, but Wang’s paper gives you a tool to fight it one case at a time.
Why it matters
You can’t assume the Spanish word “no” carries the same punishment history as the English “no.” Before your next bilingual session, spend five minutes telling the interpreter what cues, nicknames, and prior reprimands the family uses. This tiny step keeps your reinforcement squarely on the child’s actual behavior, not on translation noise.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive behavioristic conceptual analysis of acts of translation and interpretation (ATIs) by analyzing the role of historical and current context in shared meaning/understanding among parties involved in ATIs: speakers/writers, interpreters/translators, and listeners/readers. The conventional nature of verbal behavior, and the importance of and challenges inherent to ATIs are considered first. Next, B. F. Skinner's analyses of ATIs, understanding, and meaning is summarized as a starting point for an analysis of ATIs and meaning in terms of the situations in which verbal stimuli occur. A technical definition of context is provided, and we suggest that shared meaning/understanding depends upon the extent to which the historical and current contexts in which writers/speakers and readers/listeners encounter specific topographies of verbal behavior are similar. This is then applied to ATIs, focusing on the different contextual circumstances under which translation (involving written stimuli) and interpretation (involving spoken/gestural stimuli) occur, and the implications of these for shared meaning/understanding between writers/speakers and readers/listeners in different languages in ATIs.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2019 · doi:10.1007/s40617-019-00382-1