Teaching Tolerance to Delays in Reinforcement to Children with Autism and Language Delays

Many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who learn a new response to request access to desired outcomes through functional communication training use this response at higher rates than social partners can support. Therefore, it is critical that treatment focuses on teaching tolerance to delay in reinforcement or “waiting” skills when reinforcement is not immediately available. Our primary purpose in this project is to examine the effectiveness of conditional discrimination in teaching tolerance to delay in reinforcement in four young children with ASD. First, we will teach children to request access to reinforcers in the presence of a visual discriminative stimulus. Next, we will teach children to tolerate delays in reinforcement in the presence of one variation (i.e., green-color) of the discriminative stimulus while gradually increasing the time between emission of a request and delivery of reinforcement. Then we will assess maintenance and generalization to novel social partners, settings, and occasions. We will use a multiple-schedule design with generalization and maintenance probes to assess the effectiveness of our conditional discrimination strategies in producing discriminated responding and increasing children’s requesting interresponse latency to novel settings, social partners, and occasions. We will discuss practical implications and make recommendations for practitioners and researchers.