Students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have difficulties in responding to conversation with verbal language. These students often repeat what they hear, and their echoic behavior has a potentially communicative function. We define the echoic behavior when an individual repeats a peer's topic word with appropriate prosody within 3 s as the child's echoic conversational response. In this study, we examined the acquisition of the child's echoic conversational response skills and whether these skills could provide and generalize natural conversation for 4 students with ASD. During the training, students were instructed to imitate the topic word that the experimenter had used in the latest conversation. Students learned the child's echoic conversational response skills and improved their conversation skills. They even showed a slight generalization for nontraining materials through trainings and improvements in responding with new verbal responses. These findings suggested that expanding speakers' repertoires for students with ASD might facilitate improvement of natural conversation skills.

© 2017, © 2017 Taylor & Francis. Introduction: Neurofeedback (NF) training aims the enhancement of self-regulation over brain activities. While it is largely recognized as an effective treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the existence of non-learners has also been reported. The present study explored pre-training assessment indices that could predict learners prior to NF training. Methods: Twenty-two children with ADHD participated in slow cortical potential (SCP) NF training and completed pre- and post-training assessments. Participants were classified into learners or non-learners based on their progress in the SCP regulation, and pre-training indices that differentiate the two groups were examined by decision tree analysis. Results and Discussion: The learner rate in NF training was 45.5%. Learners were predicted by pre-training cognitive and neurophysiological measures regarding Stroop tasks, which suggested relatively intact executive function as their characteristics. Given that NF training is not universally effective for children with ADHD, further studies are necessary to establish application criteria.

© 2018, Association for Behavior Analysis International. In Japan, both typically developing students and students with developmental disabilities often exhibit difficulties with Kanji (Japanese ideogram) writing. These students sometimes demonstrate mirror writing (retrography), suggesting that they have difficulty in locating the parts of Kanji words rather than in writing itself. We examined whether five students with writing difficulties could learn and maintain the stimulus relations among Kanji words, spoken sounds, and corresponding pictures required for writing skills by using two types of pairing procedures: sequential stimulus pairing (SSP) and stimulus pairing (SP). In the SSP procedure, one of the two parts of a Kanji word was presented on the one side of a display, and the other part was sequentially presented on the other side, prior to presentation of the whole Kanji word. In the SP procedure, the whole Kanji word and its spoken sound were presented first, followed by its corresponding picture. The effects of training, as measured by writing performance and the number of training blocks to meet a mastery criterion, were evaluated by means of binominal tests and analysis of variance. The results showed that all students learned to correctly write Kanji words using both procedures, although the SSP procedure required fewer training blocks and enabled students to maintain their knowledge longer. These results suggest that presenting the parts of a stimulus sequentially in their correct spatial location made it easier to observe the Kanji stimuli and might therefore facilitate the acquisition of Kanji writing skills.

Children with intellectual disabilities (ID) often have difficulty in sentence reading and comprehension. Previous studies have shown that training in segment-unit reading (SUR) facilitates the acquisition of sentence reading comprehension skills for Japanese students with ID. However, it remains unknown whether SUR training is also effective for individuals unable to read sentences and can generalize to untrained sentences. In this study, we examined the improvement and generalization of sentence reading accuracy and comprehension for two children with ID through SUR training with listening comprehensible sentences. During training, the segments were sequentially presented in their correct spatial locations, and participants read them aloud. After the training, participants' reading accuracy and comprehension improved for both trained and untrained sentences. The results suggest that presenting the components of stimuli sequentially in their correct spatial locations is key to facilitating the development of sentence reading accuracy and comprehension for individuals with ID.

© 2015, Association for Behavior Analysis International. Students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have difficulties in learning stimulus relations in spelling. Using the two-stimulus pairing procedure, we examined the emergence of stimulus relations between Japanese and English words by comparing the spelling performance of five students with ASD with that of five typically developing students. In the Japanese-English pairing procedure, a Japanese word was presented first, followed by its English translation, and in the English-Japanese pairing, an English word was presented first, followed by its Japanese translation. Training effects were evaluated with a sign test and analysis of variance. All the students correctly spelled the English words in both procedures. The Japanese-English pairing procedure required fewer training blocks than the English-Japanese pairing procedure. In the Japanese-English pairing, students with ASD required fewer training blocks than typically developing students. These results suggest that presenting already established words (i.e., Japanese) first might better facilitate the emergence of stimulus relations in a stimulus pairing procedure.

© 2014 Japanese Teratology Society. To reveal the relation between intellectual disability and the deleted intervals in Williams syndrome, we performed an array comparative genomic hybridization analysis and standardized developmental testing for 11 patients diagnosed as having Williams syndrome based on fluorescent in situ hybridization testing. One patient had a large 4.2-Mb deletion spanning distally beyond the common 1.5-Mb intervals observed in 10/11 patients. We formulated a linear equation describing the developmental age of the 10 patients with the common deletion; the developmental age of the patient with the 4.2-Mb deletion was significantly below the expectation (developmental age=0.51×chronological age). The large deletion may account for the severe intellectual disability; therefore, the use of array comparative genomic hybridization may provide practical information regarding individuals with Williams syndrome.

Japanese students with developmental disabilities often exhibit difficulties in reading, particularly in Kanji (ideogram) reading, and in acquiring the equivalence relations between pictures, written words, and sounds. Previous research suggested that one student with autism could acquire Kanji reading along with equivalence relations through stimulus pairing training. However, maintenance rates tended to be very low, possibly due to the lack of picture stimuli. In this study, we examined the acquisition and maintenance of Kanji reading skills through stimulus pairing training using corresponding pictures for six students with developmental disabilities. We prepared stimulus pairs consisting of picture stimuli that the students could name along with a corresponding Kanji character that they could not read. All students successfully acquired and maintained the Kanji reading skills through this procedure. These findings suggest that the nameability of picture stimuli in stimulus pairing training may facilitate the acquisition and maintenance of equivalence relations for reading. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.