1. The Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program (The VB-MAPP): Field-Test Data from Typical Children and Children with Autism
Chair: Mark L. Sundberg
Presenters: Mark L. Sundberg & Lisa Hale
Mike Miklos
William A. Galbraith

2. Mark L. Sundberg, Carl T. Sundberg & Lisa Hale,
The VB-MAPP: An Overview and Field-Test Data from California, Indiana, and Oregon
Mark L. Sundberg, Carl T. Sundberg & Lisa Hale,

3. The Roots of a Verbal Behavior Assessment
Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior (1957)
Happy 50th Anniversary!
Jack Michael, teacher of Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior (starting in 1955)
Joseph Spradlin, applications to the developmentally disabled
“The Parsons Language Sample” (1963)

4. The Purpose of a Language Assessment

5. The Purpose of a Language Assessment

6. The Purpose of a Language Assessment

7. The Purpose of a Language Assessment

8. The Purpose of a Language Assessment
Determine the operant level of a child’s verbal (and related) skills
Compare to typical language development data
Identify language acquisition and learning “barriers”
If and where to begin intervention (placement)
Establish IEP goals
Design an individualized curriculum/intervention program
Teaching strategies (e.g., AC, DTT-NET, inclusion, in-home)
Is the intervention program working? Why or why not?
A tool to demonstrate learning, track progress, make changes, provide outcome measures

9. Behavioral Language Assessment
The verbal operant is the functional unit (form and function)
Environmental variables are viewed as the relevant sources of control for verbal responses, rather than cognitive or biological variables
Each verbal operant involves separate sources of control (independent variables), thus each must be assessed
Most verbal responses are under multiple sources of control
More complex verbal behavior is comprised of various combinations of the verbal operants
Speaker and listener as separate repertoires
Criterion-referenced assessment

10. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP
Based on Skinner’s (1957) analysis of verbal behavior
Based on typical language development milestones
By identifying milestones, as opposed to a task analysis of individual skills, the focus can be sharper, and the direction clearer
Field test data from approximately 60 typically developing children
Field test data from over 100 children with autism
The body of empirical research that provides the foundation of Behavior Analysis
Empirical research on Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior

11. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP
There are four components of the VB-MAPP
The VB-MAPP: Skills Assessment contains 165 verbal behavior milestones across 3 developmental levels (0-18 mos., mos., mos.), and 16 different verbal operants and related skills
The VB-MAPP: Skills Task Analysis provides a further breakdown of the 16 different skill areas in the form of a checklist for skills tracking
The VB MAPP: Barriers Assessment examines 22 common learning and language barriers faced by children with autism
The VB-MAPP: IEP Goals provides over 200 IEP objectives directly linked to the skills and barriers assessments, and verbal behavior intervention program (Sundberg, in preparation)

12. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Skills Assessment
The assessment is designed to identify the child’s existing language and related skills
An assessment should probe a representative sample of a repertoire
Typical verbal milestones can provide the frame for the sample
Typical verbal milestones can help to avoid focusing on only minor steps
Typical verbal milestones can help to avoid targeting skills for intervention that are developmentally inappropriate
IEP goals can match the milestones, not individual skills

13. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Skills Assessment
The 16 skills assessed on the VB-MAPP include:
The elementary verbal operants (e.g., echoic, imitation, mand, tact, intraverbal)
The listener skills
Vocal output
Play and social skills
Visual perceptual skills, and matching-to-sample
Grammatical and syntactical skills
Group and classroom skills
Beginning academic skills

14. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Skills Assessment
The milestones are broken into three developmental levels
Level 1: 0-18 months
Level 2: months
Level 3: months
The scores for each skill are approximately balanced across each level
There are 5 items and 5 possible points for each skill area

17. VB-MAPP Level 1: Tact

33. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment
It is important to find out what a child can do (The VB-MAPP Skills Assessment), but also important to know what they can’t do, and analyze why they can’t do it
The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment is a tool that is designed to identify and score 22 different learning and language acquisition barriers
Once a specific barrier has been identified, a more detailed descriptive and/or functional analysis of that problem is required
There are many ways that a verbal repertoire or related skill can become defective, and an individualized analysis will be necessary to determine what the nature of the problem is for a specific child, and what intervention program might be appropriate

34. Common Learning and Language Acquisition Barriers
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment
Common Learning and Language Acquisition Barriers
Instructional control (Escape/avoidance)
Behavior problems
Defective mand
Defective tact
Defective motor imitation
Defective echoic (e.g., echolalia)
Defective matching-to-sample

35. Common Learning and Language Acquisition Barriers
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment
Common Learning and Language Acquisition Barriers
Defective listener repertoires (e.g., LD, LRFFC)
Defective intraverbal
Defective play and social skills
Prompt dependent, long latencies
Scrolling responses
Defective scanning skills
Failure to make conditional discriminations (CDs)
Failure to generalize

36. Common Learning and Language Acquisition Barriers
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment
Common Learning and Language Acquisition Barriers
Weak or atypical MOs
Response requirements weakens the MO
Self-stimulation
Articulation problems
Obsessive-compulsive behavior
Reinforcement dependent
Does not attend to people/materials

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Thank You!
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