Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to establish comprehension of the value of money for a child with autism, so that he would be able to live independently in his community. Three children participated in Experiment 1: one eight-year-old boy with autism, and two children without autism… a three-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl. The children were taught to identify 100 yen and 10 yen coins by an errorless learning procedure using a stimulus equivalence paradigm and auditory control. In Experiment 2, the boy with autism was trained in the skill of comparing coins and prices in numerals up to 100 yen, in 10-yen steps. After the training, stimulus generalization was examined by testing discrimination of an equivalence between prices and coins with a transition. As a result of Experiment 1, all three children could distinguish between the coins when the trainer asked them orally. There were no differences among the three children except that the boy with autism took more trials than the other two children. However, the boy with autism could not infer the value of the coins, although he could identify numeral prices and express the symmetry between prices and coins by counting spontaneously. Actually, he could not demonstrate stimulus generalization in Experiment 2, in spite of showing the ability to count in order from 10 yen to 100 yen in 10-yen steps. These results suggest the effectiveness of the errorless learning procedure. They also show the functional independence of the two stimuli… coins and prices… and the two types of skill for the basic comprehension of the value of money. That is, understanding monetary value is necessary for the skill of discriminating equivalence, and also for making comparisons between prices and coins.
