Assessing Nonverbal Same/Different Judgments of Auditory Stimuli in Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities: A Methodological Investigation.

This methodological paper reports an initial attempt to evaluate the feasibility and utility of a nonverbal task for assessing generalized same/different judgments of auditory stimuli in individuals who have intellectual disabilities. Study 1 asked whether participants could readily acquire a baseline of auditory same/different, go-left/go-right performance with minimal prompting. Sample stimuli consisted of pairs of successively presented sine-wave tones. If the tones were identical, participants were reinforced for selections of a visual stimulus on the left side of the computer screen; if the two stimuli were different, selections of the visual stimulus on the right were reinforced. Two of five participants readily acquired the task, generalized performance to other stimuli and completed a rudimentary protocol for examining auditory discriminations that are potentially more difficult than those used to establish the initial task. In Study 2, two participants who could not perform the go-left/go-right task with tone stimuli, but could do so with spoken-word stimuli, successfully transferred control by spoken words to tones via an auditory superimposition-and-fading procedure. The findings support the feasibility of using the task as a general-purpose auditory discrimination assessment.