An Auditory–Vocal Package for Story Recall in Chinese Children with Autism: Evaluating Forward Chaining and Emergent Divergent–Convergent Relations

This study evaluated the effects of a strictly auditory–vocal instructional package, combining cued vocal rehearsal, forward chaining, and multiple stimulus control arrangements, on the acquisition of forward intraverbal story recall (RC, divergent relations) and the emergent performance on untaught reverse character identification (CI, convergent relations) probes across nine children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Utilizing a concurrent multiple-baseline design across character chains replication, the 1:1 intervention integrated the auditory–vocal components without initial permanent visual aids. All nine participants met the mastery criterion for the directly taught forward story-recall chains (mean = 4.6, 4.9, and 4.3 sessions across target characters). Following instruction, unreinforced probe performance on untaught CI relations increased above pre-instruction levels for all participants, with seven achieving mastery on these convergent tasks. Maintenance probes conducted at 2 and 4 weeks post-instruction demonstrated sustained responding for the majority of participants, though marked individual variability—including notable performance decays in story recall for two participants—was observed. Because a formal component analysis was not conducted, the specific contribution of vocal rehearsal cannot be isolated from the overall package, and theoretical mechanisms such as joint control serve only as a cautious, tentative conceptual account. While limited by CI’s functional problem-solving evidence being tempered by its measurement format within the staggered concurrent arrangement, the absence of component isolation, and direct classroom generalization probes, these preliminary findings suggest that package utilizing strictly auditory–vocal arrangements demonstrates initial feasibility for establishing complex intraverbal forward chains under controlled 1:1 clinical conditions. This foundation allows future research on adapting this package, considering temporal location parameter adjustments, to support multi-component stimulus control for vocal independence within inclusive classroom settings like Learning in Regular Classrooms (LRC).