Teaching rudimentary reading skills to students with autism

Abstract

This study aimed to verify the emergence of relations between printed word and picture, dictated word and printed word and naming words, with the instruction of relations between different stimuli (picture – printed word) and between stimulus and response (naming pictures), employing the multi-sample matching. Two students with a previous diagnosis of autism and enrolled in a special institution participated of this study. The multi-sample matching procedure for teaching the relations between pictures and printed words was employed. In this procedure, each student’s attempt was composed of three sample stimuli and three comparison stimuli. The participant should match each of the comparison stimuli with the corresponding sample stimulus. Picture naming relation was also taught. In the test, it was assessed the emergence of relations between printed words and pictures, between dictated words and printed words and naming printed words. The two participants required a low number of attempts in the multi-sample matching procedure to achieve the learning criteria of the tasks and presented emergence of relations not directly taught. The results showed that, in the naming tasks, the participants presented improvement in the performance in the relations evaluated (naming pictures, words, letters and vowels). The two participants maintained zero performance in naming syllables. Future studies should consider the behavioral characteristics of the participants as a resource for teaching planning.