Abstract:
Stimulus equivalence involves teaching two conditional discriminations that
share one stimulus in common and testing all possible conditional discriminations not
taught (Saunders & Green, 1999). Despite considerable research in the laboratory,
applied studies of stimulus equivalence have been limited (Vause, Martin, Marion, &
Sakko, 2005). This study investigated the field-effectiveness of stimulus equivalence in
teaching reading skills to children with Autism. Participants were four children with
Autism receiving centre-based intensive behavioural intervention (lBI) treatment. Three
of the participants, who already matched pictures to their dictated names, demonstrated
six to eight more emergent performances after being taught only to match written words
to the same names. One participant struggled with the demands of the study and his
participation was discontinued. Results suggest that stimulus equivalence provided an
effective and efficient teaching strategy for three of the four participants in this study.
