Dissertation Defenses

Doctoral Dissertation Announcement

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Candidate: Woan Tian Chow

Degree of: Doctor of Philosophy

Department: Psychology

Title: Using Environmental Sounds to Initiate Receptive Language Training for Children with Autism

Committee:
Dr. Richard W. Malott, Chair
Dr. Ron Van Houten
Dr. Stephanie Peterson
Dr. Steve Ragotzy

Date: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
3723 Wood Hall

Abstract:
A pre-test showed that three pre-school children with autism had difficulty learning to match spoken words to objects (receptive identification). Therefore, the children were first taught to match environmental sounds to objects (e.g., to touch a tambourine, when they heard the sound of the tambourine) and then to match spoken words to other objects while continuing to match the mastered environmental sounds to the original objects. For all three children, simply learning the environmental-sound/object matching did not facilitate learning spoken-word/object matching; however, intermixing the training of spoken-word/object matching with the previously mastered environmental-sound/object matching did result in the mastery of those intermixed spoken-word/object matches, which, in turn, led to the mastery of additional spoken-word/object matches without further involvement of environmental-sound/object matching. Incidentally, for the environmental-sound/object matching, the objects had been modified to produce no auditory feedback when touched by the children, demonstrating that auditory feedback was not needed to learn the environmental-sound/object matching.