Effects of Preference on the Transfer from Labels to Requests in Children with Autism.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to replicate and extend Wallace et al. (2006) to determine the importance of "motivation" on the transfer from a label to a request. The current study included children diagnosed with autism who had a verbal behavior repertoire (Wallace et al., (2006) included adults diagnosed with severe mental retardation who used sign language). A preference assessment was conducted to identify both high-preferred (HP) and low-preferred (LP) toys. Therefore, in the present study children diagnosed with autism were taught to label both HP and LP toys and then tested whether the label response transferred to a request response.