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Protocols for Assessing Derived Relations in Typically Developing Children and Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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Abstract

There have been numerous developmental studies of relational framing in children with and without developmental disabilities. In the current research, we sought to explore various facets of the core repertoires of arbitrarily applicable relational responding in order to determine how these repertoires potentially influenced one another. In particular, we assessed repertoires of coordination, distinction, comparison, and opposition with both mutually entailed (ME) and combinatorially entailed (CE) relations, as well as deictic relations in typically developing children and in children with autism spectrum disorder. We also systematically investigated the contextual conditions under which the two groups of children could or could not demonstrate the target relational responses (i.e., by testing the relations in contexts that were more or less naturalistic). Overall, the results indicated no uniform patterns that differentiated the two groups, suggesting that relational repertoires do not develop in a linear manner from nonarbitrary to arbitrary or from mutual to combinatorial entailment. Furthermore, the context in which these repertoires are assessed also appears to be important. That is, naturalistically presented trials do not necessarily appear to be easier for these children to demonstrate than when trials are presented in a more abstract format. The novel protocols presented here show how key patterns of derived relational responding can be systematically assessed and potentially compared, in a manner that may be of use to developmental and educational researchers.

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Notes

  1. The Intelligence and Development Scales (IDS), the Unexpected Change Test, and the John and Mary Test were administered, but the data are not reported in the current research for reasons of brevity. Please contact Krystyna Pomorska for further information relating to these measures.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland

    Krystyna Pomorska, Paweł Ostaszewski & Ciara McEnteggart

  2. Ciara McEnteggar, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Yvonne Barnes-Holmes

Authors
  1. Krystyna Pomorska
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  2. Paweł Ostaszewski
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  3. Yvonne Barnes-Holmes
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  4. Ciara McEnteggart
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Correspondence to Ciara McEnteggart.

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Conflict of Interest

Krystyna Pomorska declares that she has no conflict of interest. Paweł Ostaszewski declares that he has no conflict of interest. Yvonne Barnes-Holmes declares that she has no conflict of interest. Ciara McEnteggart declares that she has no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants and their parents or guardians included in the study.

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Krystyna Pomorska (kpomorska@swps.edu.pl) may be contacted to request access to the data supporting the current findings.

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Pomorska, K., Ostaszewski, P., Barnes-Holmes, Y. et al. Protocols for Assessing Derived Relations in Typically Developing Children and Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Psychol Rec 71, 435–460 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-020-00442-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-020-00442-x

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