We assessed the emergence of visual-visual conditional discriminations following training of vocal tact and intraverbal relations. Ten preschool-age children learned to vocally tact six visual stimuli, A1 through B3. Next, they learned to respond intraverbally to the dictated names of A1, A2, and A3 by vocalizing the names of B1, B2, and B3, respectively. Emergent A-B and B-A relations were tested in a visual-visual match-to-sample (MTS) task. Five of ten participants passed the test, with or without a prompt to tact the sample stimulus. Four of the five failed a reverse intraverbal test that involved responding to dictated names of B stimuli by vocalizing names of A stimuli. The remaining participants failed the MTS test, apparently due to failures to maintain the trained vocal responses throughout testing. Accurate MTS performance in the absence of bidirectional intraverbal relations appears to contradict Horne and Lowe's (1996) analysis of the possible role of intraverbal naming in emergent stimulus control.
We evaluated the effects of operant discrimination training (ODT) on the vocalizations of 3 boys with autism. We compared ODT to a stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP) condition and a control condition in an adapted alternating-treatments design. ODT increased the target vocalizations of all participants compared to the control condition, and its effects were similar to SSP. All participants preferred ODT to SSP.
The rich technology of stimulus preference assessment (SPA) is a product of 40 years of experimental research. Basic principles of reinforcement and a modest empirical literature suggest that high-preference stimuli identified via SPA may enhance treatment efficacy and decrease problem behavior more effectively than less-preferred stimuli. SPAs can be conducted using one of several methods associated with different time requirements and outcomes. Despite the broad applicability of preference assessments, we are unaware of widely available practitioner guidelines that prescribe when to use SPAs, how to select and modify specific SPA procedures, and how to supplement SPAs with other procedures for maximizing performance. The purpose of the current article is to describe a model for practitioners to select and conduct preference assessments based on practical considerations and research findings. Data are also reported from the application of the proposed model to preference assessments for 20 individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders.
We evaluated the effects of collateral response requirements during listener training on the emergence of vocal foreign-language tacts and intraverbals among 4-and 5-yearold children. In Experiment 1, participants were first exposed to auditory-visual match-to-sample training without collateral response requirements. Four participants did not perform to criterion in probes for derived vocal responses, and were exposed to a two-phase intervention that involved adding echoic and native-language tact requirements to match-tosample trials. Performance did not improve as a result of the intervention. However, all participants passed tact probes after receiving direct tact and intraverbal training with a subset of the stimuli, and two of four participants also passed the intraverbal probes. Experiment 2 addressed potential limitations of Experiment 1 with three additional participants, but collateral response requirements still failed to affect the emergence of tacts and intraverbals.
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