Five‐year‐old children were taught three‐stage sequences of arbitrary matching: A‐C, B‐C, A‐D; A‐C, B‐D, B‐C; or A‐C, A‐D, B‐C. Each stage refers to a sample‐comparison relation between stimuli. Unreinforced test probes revealed untrained arbitrary matches (B‐D, A‐D, and B‐D, respectively), derivable by substitution of stimuli with a common sample or comparison function. Additional probes revealed further untrained sample‐comparison relations derivable by substitution and identity, including the commuted relations D‐B, D‐A, and D‐B, respectively. These processes may have relevance to conceptual and verbal behavior.
A combination of positive reinforcement and fading of physical guidance was used to teach a profoundly retarded boy specific responses to specific verbal instructions. The design consisted of a multiple baseline of probe data across different verbal instructions. The subject started responding correctly to each verbal instruction as that item was trained in a multiple-baseline order. Generalization did not occur to items that had not yet been trained, nor did it occur to items included to assess generalization. Probes of variations in the verbal instructions, conducted after training was completed, revealed that generalization was minimal except in those cases where the variation consisted of the verb only, the noun only, the noun plus preposition, or where the verb of the instruction was presented last. Training a profoundly retarded 11-yr-old subject to respond to specific verbal instructions did not adequately facilitate the development of a generative instruction-following capability, nor did all verbal elements of the instruction control a specific response.Instruction-following behavior can be defined as the ability to make the appropriate response to a verbal command. Whitman, Zakaras, and Chardos (1971) used a combination of reinforcement and physical guidance to increase the instruction-following behavior of two severely retarded children. Increases in such behaviors occurred for both trained and untrained items. In the discussion, they mentioned that it was unclear whether the increases seen in instruction-following behavior were due to a lack of motivation on the part of the subjects before training, to the subjects' learning specific responses, or to having responses come under the control of specific stimuli. In addition, if the subject continually failed to respond to an in1Appreciation is expressed to David Gast for the time he spent conducting training sessions, to Janet
This paper reviews research on the early receptive language development of normal and language-handicapped children. A functional analysis perspective emphasizes how developmental changes are effected through the interactions of children with their environments. Lexical acquisition and early morphological/syntactic acquisition are addressed, functional processes that appear to be responsible for early lexical learning and for the application of syntactic rules during interpretation of early multiword utterances during normal receptive language development are isolated. Lexical training with language-handicapped children might be improved by (a) encouraging and making sure of children's action response strategy, (b) exploiting children's early reliance on extra-linguistic cues and then systematically shifting stimulus control, and (c) taking advantage of an elimination strategy. Morphological/syntactic training might be improved by selecting language input and training strategies that have been found to facilitate recombinative generalization.
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