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Receptive Identification & Receptive Language Skills for Kids with Autism

Dr. Mary Barbera

A lot of children with autism or signs of autism get stuck when it comes to learning receptive language abilities, such as touching body parts or touching a banana out of several pictures. I got a lot of really great advice on receptive identification over the past two decades from Dr. Mark Sundberg. So today we’re talking about some key lessons from Dr. Sundberg in teaching receptive language skills.

Receptive Identification

I think what’s missing in a lot of ABA programs that aren’t utilizing BF Skinner’s approach enough is lack of attention to multiple control and lack of attention to transfer trials and errorless teaching and blaming the student for lack of progress. I see that as being really critical.
It’s one of the five areas where parents and professionals get stuck. The number one area is taking kids from nonvocal to vocal – getting them talking, or getting them saying sounds or getting echoic control. The number two area is receptive identification, like understanding, touch your body parts, or touch the banana in a field of three. I’ve seen young kids stuck with receptive. I’ve seen 16-year-olds with no receptive language.
And I remember way back with The Verbal Behavior project, where I first met Dr. Sundberg, where I was the lead behavior analyst from 2003 to 2010, we did case studies one afternoon. And so we presented this kid who was about eight or 10 years of age. He had just transferred into a classroom. I remember he had no receptive language to speak of. He had PICA, he had all these issues. So I had the teacher at the time holding up two cards. She was saying, touch the ball and he was just touching either one.

Multiple Control

Dr. Sundberg said two things after watching this. He said, stop having the teacher hold up the cards because then the teacher has no hands to prompt. So we started putting a lot more things on the table. And then the second thing that he said is in order to get receptive identification, you really have to have strong matching and scanning.
A lot of my programs now in my online courses – and the way I teach – is to use multiple control. So on the probe sheet, it might say touch head with an imitative prompt and then use a transfer trial to try to shape that down and get rid of that prompt.
“Multiple control basically involves two or more in a sequence that might control a response,” says Dr. Sundberg. “We’re all familiar with using an echoic prompt. That is, I put up a pen and say pen. We would say I’ve got a vocal SD and a visual SD. I might also have a motivating operation at strength. That is, the child wants the pen to write something. Those three sources of control may get the child to respond. Under the circumstances of seeing the item, wanting the item, and hearing the word. But yet it allows you to evoke that word. So I got a response now that I can do something with, I can reinforce it.”
Dr. Sundberg says the next task is to transfer control. Usually, it’s the echoic control that gives away what the child should say, such as “pen.” If you just hold up the pen, you don’t get the right response. Even though they might want the pen and try to grab it. You need to transfer control from echoic to the tact and to the object.
“When I say touch pen, what the child with autism needs to do is scan the array and then emit some kind of response indicating the pen,” Dr. Sundberg continues. “But the tricky part is that the source of control is a spoken word. Verbal stimulus control is often very difficult to acquire. And that is obvious in, for example, the intraverbal relation. There’s a lot of parts to words. And it’s hard for kids often to learn, to take those words and have some correspondence with the physical environment.”

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Transfer Procedures

This is how to establish a skill. A lot of kids can easily match a pen if they can see the pen as the control. But if there is a second stimulus present, now you have multiple control. For instance, you can show the pen and say the word pen. This is still matching, but now you can get rid of the visual and transfer to using a verbal stimulus.

Dr. Sundberg told me about a procedure where he’d have a picture of a pen to use as a prompt, say “find pen” and have the child match it from an array. Then he would start covering his hand over the picture, or showing it quickly and removing it so that eventually the child would know to look for the picture of a pen in the array just by hearing the prompt and possibly seeing a blank card. This can help strengthen receptive language skills even for children or teens who have been struggling for a long time.

The analysis of multiple control and transfer procedures in an ABA program is important. I know Rick Kubina and I published a study in 2005 using transfer procedures to teach tacts to a child with autism. Lucas was in the study and Rick Kubina was my mentor. For Lucas, because I think of his strong Lovaas ABA background, his receptive column was a lot higher than his tact. And what I found with his particular profile is that if I gave a prompt to him in a receptive to tact format, it was almost like doing multiple choice.

For More with Dr. Sundberg

If you want to watch the whole interview with me and Dr. Sundberg, you can go to marybarbera.com/53. You can also listen to it as you’re on the go on Apple podcasts by searching for Turn Autism Around.

And if you’re a parent or professional who needs more information about how to get unstuck, I’d like to invite you to a free online workshop at marybarbera.com/workshops. If you like this little video blog, I would love it if you would give me a thumbs up, leave a comment, share with others, subscribe to my channel. I hope to see you right here next week.

Free Workshop to Learn to Turn Autism (or Signs of Autism) Around

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