With our Receptive Identification tools, you can teach listener responding skills by asking your learner to “Show me…”, “Point to…”, or “Touch…” or asking “Where is…”. Once they have mastered the ability to indicate named items, parts of items, categories of items, or actions done to or with those items, through our Verbal Matrix you can teach labeling those items as well as their associated functions, features, and classes. Finally, through a technique known as intraverbal webbing, teach conversation skills by asking open ended, fill in the blank, or direct WH-questions with the images hidden from the learner’s view, only to be revealed as a prompt or reward. With aba|tools, your learner has access to all the materials necessary to achieve fluent conversational skills.

The Verbal Matrix was created to provide learners with images of the things common in their environment, and their parents and professionals to have the ability to navigate through those items easily. With more than 1000 (and growing!) items you can teach not just by name, but by the relationships between those items, you now have unprecedented access to an interconnected web of things common to young children organized by relationships. When sitting with a learner and scrolling through the pictures, a simple conversation could be started. What is that? A dog. What does it have? A tail. What can you do with a dog? Hug it. The Verbal Matrix makes these kinds of simple conversations, the building blocks for more complex and fluent dialogue, possible. With a robust tacting program in which the labels of items as well as their associated features, functions, and classes are taught, a learner will have the foundation to begin learning conversation skills with the Verbal Matrix.

Intraverbals are the responses we give to others’ verbal behavior. If you were to ask “What says woof-woof?” the response, dog, would be an intraverbal. To fill in a song lyric such as “Twinkle twinkle little…”, provide the answer to a yes/no question, or say your name when asked are all intraverbals. In order to gain fluency, or the ability to respond to an ever-changing conversation filled with intraverbal behavior, many factors need to be present, including accuracy, speed of response, and in many cases the variety of the response. It is one thing to ask “What are your parent’s names?” or when your birthday is. Those answers don’t change. Speed and accuracy are the only important considerations. If you were to change the task to “Name three animals.” and get the response “Dog, cat, bird” and those are the only three accurate and speedy responses the learner can state, those answers are scripted, not fluent. With aba|tools and the Verbal Matrix you have access to teach to fluency through nearly 10,000 relationships and multiple image examples and avoid scripted, rote responses.

When using the Verbal Matrix, you may be required to point at parts of images, enlarge or isolate the image, or use a different example when using the assessment prompts. This would be no different than when using physical image cards or from books. The acquisition of Verbal Behavior is meant to be interactive, so please do so when using aba|tools! This should be a back and forth conversation between you and your learner. At times you will hold the tablet out as you present a task, other times keep the image out of view and bring up new pictures as your learner states the item, only showing a picture when an error occurs. This can be done at a table, on the couch, in bed, in the car, or anywhere you have WiFi. The ability to take ABA wherever the learner is and continue the conversation has never been easier.