The following is an excerpt from an article written by one of the consultants from our BACA clinical team, Barbara E. Esch, PhD, BCBA-D. The article appeared in the APBA Reporter from the Association of Professional Behavior Analysts, Issue # 24-December, 2010.
Practitioner’s Notebook
Increasing speech in children with autism using the stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP) procedure
Barbara E. Esch, PhD, BCBA-D Esch Behavior Consultants, Inc.
Most typically developing children learn to talk with seemingly little effort. Two critical repertoires help make this possible. First, children say many different
sounds during babbling and vocal play (i.e., high vocal variability). Second, children usually utter those varied sounds at an exceedingly high frequency (just ask any parent!).
This facilitates learning words, as babies repeat or echo sounds they hear frequently (e.g., “say ma-ma,” “say da-da,” “say bye-bye”). Parents are delighted by any early sounds that come fairly close to their models, and over time they shape those sounds into words that sound just like their own.
Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often have limited pre-speech repertoires. It is estimated that 40% to 50% of those children with ASD fail to acquire speech (Hardman, Drew, & Egan, 1999; Johnson, 2004). They may be essentially mute, or may repeat the same few syllables over and over. When a child’s vocal production and vocal variability are very limited, a behavior analyst has virtually no vocal speech behavior to shape. This can greatly hinder training efforts and diminish the child’s prognosis for developing speech.
One behavior analytic procedure aimed at increasing the quantity of speech vocalizations is called stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP). This procedure is based
on the hypothesis that young children engage in varied, frequent vocal play because doing so produces noises that “sound good” (Bijou & Baer, 1965;
Schlinger, 1995; Skinner, 1957). It follows that if a child doesn’t readily make speech sounds, it might be helpful to make sure that human speech sounds are
as reinforcing as possible. The pairing procedure attempts to increase the “sound good” factor (i.e., conditioned reinforcing value; see Catania, 1998) by pairing an adult’s speech sounds with items or activities that the child clearly finds reinforcing. This procedure is similar to parents’ natural caregiving or play interactions (e.g., rocking while singing a lullaby, or saying “whee” while pushing the child in a swing).
Research has shown that although SSP procedures have increased the production of speech sounds in some children with ASD, the effects have been
inconsistent, and observed increases were not always maintained. At present, however, practitioners have very few well-researched interventions at their
disposal for increasing speech production in children who have very limited vocal speech skills. SSP may offer promise for some individuals.
Interested in reading more from Dr. Esch’s article? Click http://www.thebaca.com/Esch_Increasing%20speech%20in%20children.pdf to read the article, “Increasing speech in children with autism using the stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP) procedure,” in its entirety.
