Leveraging Stimulus Equivalence to Teach Piano to Autistic Children

Music-based interventions have been shown to benefit autistic individuals by improving social behavior and communication, and reducing behavioral excesses (Hill et al., 2020). The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether training more discriminable notes (i.e., “C,” “E,” and “G”) would enhance the effects of equivalence-based instruction (EBI) on the acquisition of piano skills, novel piano performance (i.e., reading sheet music), novel note performance, pitch discrimination, and the maintenance of taught and untaught piano skills among autistic children. Additionally, we examined whether participants would generalize their responding to untrained notes appearing on the staff between the trained notes (i.e., “D” and “F”). The training involved simultaneous matching of auditory-visual musical stimuli in a one-to-many arrangement. When given an auditory stimulus, learners selected letters, musical notation, and piano keys. Following training, posttests were conducted to test the emergence of novel untrained relations and musical notes. Maintenance probes occurred within 1 week of the posttests. All participants demonstrated novel piano skills and scored high on maintenance probes. However, none of the participants reached mastery level on the “perfect pitch” probes, nor did they respond accurately to the untrained notes. The results suggest EBI’s efficacy in teaching and maintaining piano skills, though with notable limitations.