The Effects of English and Spanish Instructional Sequences on the Acquisition of Conditional Discriminations

There is limited behavior analytic research evaluating the impact of teaching in both the familial and culturally dominant languages in bilingual children with autism. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of instructional sequences and language preference on the rate of acquisition of a receptive identification task targeting English and Spanish nouns with three Spanish-English bilingual children with autism. An adapted alternating treatments design was employed to compare three instructional sequences: (1) English-Spanish, (2) Spanish-English, and (3) mixed. Results for one participant demonstrated the mixed language training sequence to be the most efficient training sequence, while the Spanish-English sequence was most efficient for the other two participants. Language preference did not appear to impact learning. The results of this study are discussed in terms of the Naming Theory (Horne and Lowe 1996), and providing culturally responsive care to bilingual learners with autism.