The stimulus pairing observation procedure (SPOP) combined with multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) has been shown to be effective with typically developing preschoolers in establishing the joint stimulus control required for the development of naming. The purpose of the current investigation was to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the SPOP in establishing speaker and listener responses in children with autism. Participants were presented with pairings of auditory and visual stimuli during instruction. Participants' tacting and listener responses of the visual stimuli were then evaluated during a test phase. MEI with novel pairs of auditory and visual stimuli was conducted if participants did not demonstrate criterion performance on tact and listener probes. SPOP in conjunction with MEI was shown to be effective in establishing some of the tact and listener relations for the three participants. However, accuracy on tact probes was always lower than listener probes. The participant who responded with the highest accuracy on untaught tact and listener probes also displayed echoic responding on the lowest proportion of SPOP instruction and listener test trials.

Several papers have reviewed the literature based on Skinner's conceptual framework presented in his 1957 book, Verbal Behavior. These reviews have called for more research on the topic of verbal behavior generally and often for more research on particular verbal operants. For example, Sautter and LeBlanc (2006) urged the behavior-analytic community to conduct more research on the intraverbal because of the scant existing literature base at that time. In the current review, we replicate the procedures used by Sautter and LeBlanc focusing specifically on the intraverbal relation and on the literature published in the 10 years since their call for research. We summarize the publication themes, provide graphs of the trends and types of published articles, and offer ideas for future research specific to the intraverbal. Keywords Intraverbal. Quantitative review. Skinner. Verbal behavior Sautter and LeBlanc (2006) published a review summarizing the literature on empirical applications of Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior with humans. Their work was an extension and update of three earlier papers: a citation analysis (McPherson, Bonem, Green, & Osborne, 1984), a quantitative literature review (Eshleman, 1991), and a narrative literature review (Oah & Dickinson, 1989). Given the professional interest in Skinner's conceptual framework at the time, Sautter and LeBlanc sought to summarize the literature to provide the behavior-analytic community with an updated review across all verbal operants. They also urged researchers to provide additional empirical evidence for effective verbal behavior interventions for individuals with disabilities. Sautter and LeBlanc (2006) revealed that the overall body of empirical support for verbal behavior had increased substantially in the prior 15 years, but research on certain verbal operants such as the intraverbal remained limited. By 2006, only 14 empirical

Recent research has evaluated the utility of teaching potentially covert strategies to mediate overt performance. As an extension of this developing literature, the current study used a multiple-probe design to evaluate the effects of instructing in a visual imagining strategy on correct written spelling responses with three adolescents with various learning disabilities. After the participants were presented with the textual target stimuli, they were instructed to imagine the word in their head before writing it down. All three participants demonstrated improvements in spelling after this instruction, but two of them required additional consequences to meet the mastery criterion.

The e-Transformation in higher education, in which Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are playing a pivotal role, has had an impact on the modality in which behavior analysis is taught. In this paper, we survey the history and implications of online education including MOOCs and describe the implementation and results for the discipline's first MOOC, delivered at Southern Illinois University in spring 2015. Implications for the globalization and free access of higher education are discussed, as well as the parallel between MOOCs and Skinner's teaching machines.

Children with autism are often taught auditory conditional discriminations in the form of personal information questions that might prove useful in conversation (e.g., "What is your favorite food?" "Pizza" and "What is your favorite color?" "Purple"). In these questions, the auditory stimuli presented as part of the compound discriminative stimulus (i.e., what, favorite, color/food) do not always simultaneously control responding. If all components of the auditory stimulus do not control responding, a child may master 1 target but have trouble acquiring subsequent targets that have a component of a previously learned auditory stimulus because the previously learned response is emitted. One way to avoid this problem is to teach many targets that have no overlapping component stimuli before introducing targets that include a previously learned component. Another way to avoid the problem is to systematically introduce overlapping stimulus components simultaneously to facilitate control by all relevant components. Three children with autism were taught auditory conditional discriminations. An adapted alternating-treatments design was used to compare the use of training sets with programmed overlap of component auditory stimuli to training sets with no overlap of stimulus components. The effects of these 2 arrangements were evaluated on trials to criterion and percentage accuracy during acquisition. All participants reached mastery faster with at least 1 target set in the nonoverlap condition compared to the overlapping condition; 2 out of the 3 participants met the mastery criteria for both overlapping and nonoverlapping targets at a similar rate by the 3rd training set.