Computer-based teaching of word construction and reading in two students with developmental disabilities

Students with developmental disabilities often have difficulty in learning the systematic relations between syllables (auditory stimuli) and characters (visual stimuli) required for reading. Two students with developmental disabilities participated in the present study which used computer-based teaching applied in the home. We examined whether the students could read individual Japanese Hiragana characters after training with a constructional MTS procedure with differential outcome (DO) that was designed to teach word-construction for pictured sample stimuli. The DO procedure provided the differential stimulus (in this case spoken syllables) after response selection. The results showed that the students not only acquired appropriate word-construction responses through this task, they also learned to read Hiragana characters without direct training of this skill. The results are discussed in terms of the effect of the constructional MTS procedure with DO on the acquisition and transfer of reading characters and the applicability of computer-based home teaching.