Stimulus equivalence and intervention strategies for children with learning disabilities

Abstract

Based on the stimulus equivalence paradigm, we planned and implemented an individualized intervention for two 7- and 8 years old girls with learning disabilities. They were exposed to reading programs that included simple and complex Portuguese words. Ludic reading and spelling activities were conducted before and after the teaching program in each section. As a result, the children learned how to read the training words. Their performance on reading and spelling activities with generalization words increased with the reading intervention and the ludic activities. The gradual increase in AC uracy of verbal performance in tasks with words, phrases and brief stories, observed sporadically during the ludic activities, suggests that there was an effect of the intervention strategies not only on the repertoire that was explicitly trained but also on new modalities of writing and reading. Interventions based on the stimulus equivalence paradigm give us conditions to extend an individual’s verbal repertoire and also for teaching complex verbal units. Keywords: stimulus equivalence; reading; spelling.

Keywords

• equivalência de estímulos
• leitura
• escrita