Association for Behavior Analysis International

For Skinner (1957), if reading larger units, such as words, are taught, the control by smaller units, such as phonemes and syllables can emerge, without direct training. Basic researches during fifteen years have been conducting in order to verify this statement and check what are the relevant variables. Experiments were conducted at USP verbal operant laboratory (LEOV) in Brazil with pre-school children, from 3 to 4 years old. Through equivalence-based instruction and systematic recombination of minimal verbal units of disyllabic words in Portuguese, thirty neurotypical pre-school children learned to read twelve disyllabic words and were tested for generalization in reading new words, composed by the same units (syllables and letters) of the learned ones, with recombination of its positions in the words. The design was pre and post tests intra participants, but also with inter participants comparisons between several experimental variables effects upon 30 participant’s performances. Results were individually analyzed and showed that the main experimental variable to produce minimal verbal unit control in reading was the systematic recombination of these units in three sets of four disyllabic words. After this procedure was conducted, all children improved reading scores (next to 100% of accurate reading) with a completely new set of four disyllabic words. At the level of phoneme unit, teaching this unit only produced accurate reading of new words, when teaching phonemes was combined with systematic recombination of the syllable unit. Positive implications for practice will be pointed out, highlighting the possibility to teach reading to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with few errors.

Behavior analysts