Teaching Musical Notes to Children With and Without Autism Using Equivalence-Based Instruction

Abstract

Equivalence-Based Instruction (EBI) has been used to teach stimulus relations, such as those involving musical stimuli. Previous studies taught relations among musical stimuli in only one clef. The objective of this study was to verify the effects of teaching relations between auditory and visual music stimuli on the emergence of derived relations using matching to-sample (MTS) trials with color visual cues fading. The stimuli were the dictated names of musical notes (Set A), pictures with the note registered in the treble or bass clef (Sets B and C) and pictures with the representation of the position of the note on a keyboard (Sets D and E). An additional test was carried out to verify the generalization of learned relations to respond to a virtual keyboard due to physical similarities between some stimuli. Positive results on this additional test would indicate economy of teaching. Participants were an eight-year-old girl with typical development and an eight-year-old boy with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The one-to-many (OTM) teaching structure and the multiple probe experimental design were used. The experimental sequence was composed of a pre-test, teaching in the treble clef, posttest 1, teaching in the bass clef, and posttest 2. This study expands on previous ones by using two different exemplars for the keyboard image and for the representation of the D, F and A notes in both treble and bass clefs. All procedures were conducted remotely. Both participants have achieved performance criteria for the taught conditional relations and for the emergent ones but did not show emergence in the keyboard playing responses. The results indicate that the number of blocks for the participants to reach the learning criterion decreased for each new relation taught and that they formed six three-member equivalence classes (three for the treble clef: A1B1D1, A2B2D2 and A3B3D3; three for the bass clef: A1C1E1, A2C2E2 and A3C3E3). These data corroborate those found by previous studies that demonstrated that the use of colors as prompts facilitates the discrimination between musical stimuli and that typically developing children and children with autism had similar performances. Differently from previous studies, these promising results were obtained in a procedure conducted remotely, using digital technology.