For Mexican families of autistic children, finding access to specialized services such as applied behavior analysis can be challenging. Yet behavior-analytic intervention is critical for remediating stimulus overselectivity within the verbal repertoire. Here the authors present a case study on the use of telehealth to deliver behavior-analytic intervention to improve the verbal behavior of an autistic child who lived with her mother in northeastern Mexico.
Weekly sessions consisted of natural environment training that was interrupted every 10 min to conduct a 1-min fluency probe. After establishing a stable baseline, a clinician-led intervention was implemented, in which the behavior analysts manipulated the environment to condition different verbal operants. This was followed by a parent-led intervention, in which the participant’s mom manipulated the environment and reinforced the verbal operants.
Throughout the clinician-led intervention phase, there was broad overlap among the number of correct and incorrect verbal responses per minute. Similar levels of variability could be seen at the onset of parent-led intervention, but the two trendlines soon diverged, showing a clear separation between the increasing number of correct responses per minute and the decreasing number of incorrect responses per minute.
The authors extend prior research to show that function-based approaches to verbal behavior intervention can be effective when delivered via telehealth. While clinician-led intervention showed limited efficacy, it likely served as a critical component of training. Although limited by a quasi-experimental design, the results suggest telehealth-based verbal behavior intervention was effective for remediating functional language skills.
