Effects of a Verbal Behavior Card Sort Implemented by Early Childhood Educators on the Verbal Behavior Skills of Children with Developmental Disabilities

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated the effectiveness of Verbal Behavior Intervention on the language development of children with developmental disabilities (DeSouza, Akers, & Fisher, 2017; Petursdottir & Devine, 2017). Despite its effectiveness, research thus far has focused mostly on teaching the mand and tact, and less on the intraverbal, which is the operant that makes up the majority of everyday verbal interactions and most complex verbal behavior. Research has also demonstrated that more complex intraverbals do not emerge spontaneously until prerequisite skills across the echoic, mand, tact, and listener response have developed, all of which are emitted hundreds of times a day by the time a child is between the ages of two and three years (Sundberg & Sundberg, 2011). Once a child reaches three they more consistently emit intraverbals during communicative interactions, however intraverbals can become rote and restricted in nature during Verbal Behavior Intervention if sufficient prerequisites across other operants are not taught (Sundberg & Michael, 2001). Currently, research on Verbal Behavior Intervention has focused mostly on the ways to teach single operants (e.g., the most effective and efficient ways to teach the tact), however additional research is needed on interventions that can both move children with developmental delays more quickly towards strong echoic, mand, tact, and listener response repertoires and teach intraverbals when appropriate. This dissertation examined whether an intervention called the verbal behavior card sort (Carbone, 2017; Miklos & Dipuglia, 2010) can support growth in verbal behavior skills across operants towards the development of intraverbal prerequisites. Three early childhood special educators in reverse mainstream classrooms (i.e. 50:50 ratio of typically developing peers to children receiving special education services) implemented the verbal behavior card sort for approximately five months with one child in their classroom with a developmental disability. Results indicated that each child developed skills across multiple operants and was able to generalize these skills both to other classroom activities and contexts and to their home. Additionally, results of a questionnaire as completed by each educator indicated strong social validity for the use of the card sort in public ECSE classrooms. Implications for its use in public school classrooms in which intensive interventions based in applied behavior analysis are often not feasible are discussed.