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THE ACQUISITION OF SIMPLE AND COMPOUND SENTENCE STRUCTURE IN AN AUTISTIC CHILD 1
Author(s) -
StevensLong Judith,
Rasmussen Marilyn
Publication year - 1974
Publication title -
journal of applied behavior analysis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.1
H-Index - 76
eISSN - 1938-3703
pISSN - 0021-8855
DOI - 10.1901/jaba.1974.7-473
Subject(s) - reinforcement , psychology , set (abstract data type) , sentence , simple (philosophy) , autism , cognitive psychology , developmental psychology , natural language processing , computer science , social psychology , philosophy , epistemology , programming language
Contingent reinforcement and imitative prompts were used to teach an autistic child to use simple and compound sentences to describe a set of standard pictures. When imitative prompts and reinforcement were discontinued, correct use of simple sentences declined, but increased again when imitative prompts and reinforcement were re‐instated. When imitative prompts and reinforcements were used to teach compound sentence structure, correct use of simple sentences declined and correct use of compound structure increased. At the end of training, the child also used novel compound sentences to describe a set of pictures on which he had received no direct training.