More than 'MORE'

But I want to take some time to explore this general topic of verbal and vocal behavior and gestures and And we're going to kind of sum it up with this idea of, Dan?

Sign language signs. It must

They're just these mainstays that, in many cases, in some cases, we might be applying inappropriately or incorrectly or something that we've just been dragging along because it's made our repertoire and nobody's thought to clean it out. So yeah, this idea that your kid's not saying anything, they have a language delay, you come in, you've got a little bowl of goldfish, and as you prompt them to put their little fists together, their little bunch of fingers together, then they get another one.

And before you know it, Yeah, the kiddo is able to repeat that, and it's very, very exciting. You have a child that wasn't otherwise communicating with a very quick and simple ABA procedure that speech therapists were using and that we were definitely using and are still using. Now a kiddo is able to communicate. It's very exciting, right? So why am I so skeptical? Well, we'll get into that. I'll pass it over to you, and what are your impressions of how we use that?

It's one of many examples I know that you and I tend to discuss about, you know, why do we still do this, and what's the logic if there is any? Yeah, what are your impressions of more?

So eventually you were able to see some progress because that child was probably inundated into hundreds or thousands of trials of more. But the question is, okay, so the child, let's say the child picks up or the individual picks up the more sign. Then you run into the issue is the kid's just signing, the individual's just signing more for everything. What do they want more of? That's where the issue is, the discrimination. What's that next step? How do we get more goldfish?

How do we get more mom? How do we expand on this sign so we don't just have an individual just saying more to everything so we don't understand?

And again, I don't want to downplay the excitement, but I think you highlight the notion of the need for expansion immediately. So I think when you were starting your examples, you used my favorite, which is something like more swing. Now, if we think about that from a grammatical perspective... we're actually not modeling a very good phrase there, right? You want to swing again. Might be something. So can we differentiate that sign?

I think the answer is yes, but somehow we get stuck because we're excited on the fact that there's, maybe that's my premise. We're excited. Parents are excited. Now more becomes overgeneralized in many cases, in my experience, as opposed to expanding, as opposed to now being discriminated against another, symbol of recurrence, like again.

And then, further, something you allude to very naturally in your description is this idea that, well, if you're going to say more, then how are we going to highlight that second word so that we're always moving toward that progression of one to two to three to then however many you can fit in a grammatical sentence.

And if we start Pointing, so more, and then pointing to something else, I would beg the question, why did we need more in the first place if pointing or a million other universal, not just ASL gestures, are now maybe as effective? Again, I'm not trying to downplay the effective or the use of the initial more sign, just how maybe we tend to get stuck on it.

And with pointing, while it's not vocal, you can still get... uh... you can still get kids that are non-vocal and you can still get tons of trials right because you've got only one behavior and you're pointing whenever you point to something you receive that so you still have that continuity between behavior and reinforcement and you can run the trials which again i think is where more came from is how do we how do we get a lot of trials because you've got this this young child presumably if

we're talking about asd specifically who's Some people would say nonverbal, but Skinner would argue that verbal behavior is any behavior reinforced by another. So he's engaging in non-vocal behaviors like falling to the floor and crying and things like that. And what the parents are trying to figure out is how do I get some adaptive behavior. We'll look at crying as non-adaptive for the sake of this argument. We can address that later. Some adaptive behavior so that we can reinforce.

We need some behavior so that we can reinforce. And if he wants goldfish and I haven't run... 50 trials of goldfish, he's not going to know what that is. So if I can get more, that's some adaptive behavior that we can get. But I think you alluded to a great point there. Maybe we're looking for generalized adaptive behavior.

Maybe a point will lend a lot more information because if a kid points to the swing, I don't know how the word more gives me any more information because I know that he wants the swing or the goldfish or the water or whatever the kid wants. The word more doesn't really give any more information.

You assume that there's a desire for primary reinforcement in these goldfish, and then we prompt the sign through where maybe, just to put this question out there, it could be more effective to do something that isn't our repertoire, which is provide two options out of reach, a good distance between the two options so that You can distinguish their scanning, their eye gaze, and then reaching. Is reaching a much more developmentally appropriate and feasible behavior than prompting through more?

yes, in learning, that it's essential to learning. But then suddenly, a pretty stringent mastery criteria like 80% of opportunities across 10 days...

Knowing how long I've been in the field and that it's just this fossil carryover that Again, it begs a lot of these questions. Does it make a lot of sense? And we're poking some good holes here. I use that respectfully because we have to remember there is an initial value, and you keep highlighting that. The question, the real discussion we want to have here and we want to end up with some ideas about is how do we expand this? How do we make it more useful beyond the one word that it represents?

Again, it's for... presumably non-vocal individuals, but they're still teaching them based on the noun and the object, not just the generic more, open, all done. I can tell you how many clients I've had that you teach them those three signs, more, open, all done. Number one, that pretty much encompasses everything in their life, so no really need to expand upon those three words. If you can say those three words, you can get anything, you can...

Remove anything from your environment, and especially with ASL, if they just scroll through those three signs, well, darn near anything in my environment is going to be accessible or removed, so I'm good to go. So PECS, I think, is interesting.

I'm just looking at it from an augmentative and alternative communication standpoint, and that they're teaching from nouns, which I do think is an interesting premise and seems to be more of a typical vocal premise as well as to teach from nouns than just teach from more and generalize that.

But again, it starts with a very good premise in the notion of an expanded lexicon, kind of tying in some of our knowledge with discrete trial statistics and trying to ensure or verify that the child's discriminating between the picture cards and so forth. So yeah, in that sense, where a sign, somebody could stick it into a client's face, into their line of sight, with PECS now you've got this open-hand queue you've got a little bit more joint attention built into it.

So I'm going to give that a better grade right away. In the increased lexicon. I was never a guy's best. No, so honestly. Excuse me. The increased lexicon and the joint attention engagement, right? I need to get your attention. Not, again, oftentimes the way we teach signs is because we're excited, and I get the point, The kiddo does it, and bam, we're there to reinforce.

If we could use that same kind of vigor, now with reaching, picture card exchange, whatever that is, I think we're accessing a greater lexicon and the same kind of repetitive rigor that has ensured our success in terms of learning theory or treatment of autism.

I think if we look at language, language... just communicates an idea and it's hard so this concept of more right say the kid wants more goldfish well are goldfish goldfish or goldfish more because he has no idea what that are or swing more is everything more is there one noun and everything is labeled the word more it doesn't you kind of run into a wall there because they're never gonna well not never it's going to be difficult to then generalize hey, this goldfish, which I was told for a year

is the word more, is actually goldfish? And the swing is a swing, it's not more? That's a difficult transition to make.

And instead of gaining their attention and giving them an enriched environment, we've now limited to an overgeneralized singular target with grammatical dysfunction and inappropriateness in this case from a developmental perspective. We should be teaching all sorts of labels. Another thing that maybe fits into this, and we won't discuss much now, is numbers and colors as singular targets. They're also quantifiers and adjectives.

So again, Do I think there's a place for more as a sign? Yes, there is. I would contend in our discussion here, and I don't want to be unkind, but I would contend that I would be hard-pressed to start with it. And I am hard-pressed to allow for that to continue in our practice because there's so many holes in it.

But other than that, they're not getting access to something, so that contiguity is more distant there. It's like the concept of working out. You might have a totally different mental picture of what I have, So the less concrete we are off the beginning with getting away from nouns, I feel like makes it more abstract on exactly what you're trying to communicate to a kid more, and then that gets overgeneralized.

And as you talk about language mapping, as you're exploring with your younger clientele and hopefully transgressing that into all clientele over time, language mapping is going to be really difficult to do if we're just focusing on more. So you're trying to label, as I say, Chandler Morgan Freeman throughout the kid's life, is you label everything with the premise that our individuals that we work with at ASD, their receptive understanding is much higher than their receptive understanding.

So they're understanding a lot of these premises, but they're not expressing them back. So it's, again, I'm using this word contiguity because I think it's so important, or latency is probably a better term in this respect, that we say a word, And then they repeat that word later, and that justifies to us that they understood and know what that word means.

Hence why one of the reasons that the ASD could be increasing and digressing just a little bit is the individuals that were used to be diagnosed with mental retardation or intellectual disability now being diagnosed with autism. Why? Because you don't know what someone knows unless they can communicate it to you. That's what we run into with a lot of our kids is that they might know things, but they can't communicate it.

So if we're going to take that understanding, we should probably inundate them with as many languages, as many nouns, and as much language as possible, expanding from just more, so that when that expressive language starts to catch up with the receptive language, we've already done a ton of teaching. We don't have to start all over and teach all the nouns now at the age of five. We've taught them since the age of two, the language just hasn't come out yet.

But when the language comes out, they've already been inundated with More car, more swing, or swing again, as you say, is a more proper way of

I try to remind our younger pros to make sure they've got the gaze shifting or the line of sight, that something's making sense here, that we're not just counting on the back-end prompt to teach, that we're giving a very enriched environment otherwise. try and teach some discrimination. I try to remind them about the lack of grammaticality with something like more swing. What does the future hold for us? Where do we go with this?

So, I think number one is going back to the engagement piece, and how do we get them engaged, because I can't tell you how often I see this sign. More, a kid will just sign it, not looking at anything, not really engaged, and they'll just literally sign it in their own little bubble, staring at the wall, and then all of a sudden the parent will come from wherever what 15 different things. Oh, you meant more Oreo. You meant more Goldfish. You meant more iPad.

And there was no even intent or joint attention in that communication piece. So I'm not sure if I'm answering your question as you posed it, but I think number one is figuring out what the motivation is so we can get some intent with communication. And then once we have that intent, assuming that it's a non-vocal client, maybe just focusing on the point. And sure, you can have more or you can just work on pointing to different things.

And then as individuals progress, maybe looking into pecs if they're never going to be vocal or expanding the sign from more to more what, whatever else.

So how does a child that's two tell you they don't want something normally?

But, you know, with any kid eating goldfish or shenanigans, of course, that's reinforcement. And now we're back into this cycle of imposing, of, you know, what some people now accuse of masking, things that we're imposing that have social significance, but we may not be following the regular cues. Now, a lot of our clients, even... younger ones will show very idiosyncratic behavior, things that seem like an anomaly to us.

And I think that more is one example of many things we do to try and normalize or typify when maybe we start taking the natural cues. If this kid walks away from something, they're done. They're not interested. It's a two-year-old. If you get them to stand and look at something repetitively, that means they want more or they want you to do it again. And cultivating from those cues as opposed to doing a lot of what we've done and working from the consequence. Now, I can't blame us on that.

We talked about this in our first episode. It's what worked. It was our bread and butter. It's what was proven. But as we expand our toolbox, looking a lot more at the antecedents and the behaviors that we do have available to us and what they communicate, and as long as they're within reason, Who cares if they look idiosyncratic or weird, to use that term respectfully? What are they communicating? Are they safe? Okay, as long as it's safe, what is it communicating?

So you're moving around a lot, that means I've got to be moving around with you a lot. That means you need more. You need more stimulus. You need this one and that one and that one, and you need to move quickly. But instead, we try to kind of capture or corral and then impose these singular targets across many, many domains, which in and of themselves may not amount to an enriched environment. So, yeah.

But for me then, I would counter the joint attention pieces, the pointing, the gaze shift, the reaching, the tapping, the shifting gaze from a person's face to the object back to the person's face as they use the point proximally, distally, bringing objects to the parent.

So practicing those things, the proto-declarative, the proto-imperative, to use those fancy words, which we'll get into later, I'm sure at another discussion when we explore joint attention more closely, but coming in with the new shiny items, several new shiny items, they don't have to be fancy. Kids get engaged by the simplest things. As we all know from holiday presents or birthday presents being opened and kids paying attention to the wrapping more.

But instead we overreach and we should be coming in with anything that can be engaging and practicing engagement. Take this over to your mom. Take this over to your dad. Let's show them. Let's have them comment on that. Let's have them shift your gaze from the object to your face and show you something and create a sense of joint attention, but more importantly, a sense of wonderment, a sense of enrichment. I can show you things around you that are interesting.

I think we were recently enjoying a little lunch together, and I showed you my lodestones, my little magnets, and kind of rolled one out. And then as soon as you touched it, I rolled the other one out, and you chuckled. Immediately you were like, oh, my God, this thing is a magnet. And I didn't think it was, and it's a shiny rock. Absolutely. And, again, it's a really stupid, simple example I'm giving.

But that created a sense of wonderment there where – The child was naturally telling me he wanted me to more of the magnets. He wanted me to do it again because I would give all the magnets and he'd have them all in his hand and he would hand them over to me. What does that mean? Do this again, man. Yep. Do this again. Yep. Okay. And then we did that for, you know, 10, 15 minutes, literally counting, clicking. He was rolling them back to me now. And then he left and went to a different activity.

What was he communicating at that point?

So it'd be interesting as we get more people listening to this to get ideas a speech therapist, or any speech therapist out there, speech language pathologist, that wants to help explain this to us. Because I know it seems to be common practice with them, too. And they might have some insight that we're lacking, and they often do, in their own content expertise. So just to kind of, we're wrapping up our time here. We want to keep these things brief and informative and not too long.

Our pilot episode was long for a reason. But in wrapping up, Dan, what do you want to assert here? What's your closing point?

So how we now expand on that to ensure that We're also using the natural gestures and behaviors of them, leaving the activity, giving the items back to you to ask for you to do things again or more or something. A lot of natural, not ASL signs, non-ASL signs that we can take advantage of before we impose our idea of intervention. So it's been great. Talking with everybody again, thank you for joining us. We're really, really happy.

This is catching a little bit of a fire, a little bit of momentum, so we appreciate your time and lending you this information. Dan, any closing words? Cheers. Thanks a lot. Always analyze responsibly. Take care.