An Analysis of Verbal Stimulus Control in Intraverbal Behavior: Implications for Practice and Applied Research

Abstract

A common characteristic of the language deficits experienced by children with autism (and other developmental disorders) is their failure to acquire a complex intraverbal repertoire. The difficulties with learning intraverbal behaviors may, in part, be related to the fact that the stimulus control for such behaviors usually involves highly complex verbal stimuli. The antecedent verbal control of intraverbal behavior may involve discriminative stimuli (i.e., discriminated operants), conditional stimulus control, and/or control by compound stimuli. Distinctions among these different types of antecedent control are presented, along with recommendations for intervention procedures that may facilitate the acquisition of intraverbal behavior.

Neuroscience of imagination and implications for human evolution

“…SLPs commonly refer to top-down imagination developing techniques as "combining adjectives, location/orientation, color, and size with nouns," "following directions with increasing complexity," and "building the multiple features/clauses in the sentence" 149 . In ABA jargon, these techniques are known as "visual-visual and auditory-visual conditional discrimination" [150][151][152][153] , "development of multi-cue responsivity" 143 , and "reduction of stimulus overselectivity" 144 .…”

Using intraverbal prompts to increase divergent intraverbal responses by a child with autism

“…The purpose of the present study was to provide preliminary evidence with a clinical demonstration of using intraverbal prompts to increase the total number of varied responses to categorical questions for a child with ASD, who was observed to engage in repetitive and restricted patterns of activities and interests. Each categorical question involved a compound stimulus with two components (e.g., red things), as defined by Eikeseth and Smith (2013).…”

Teaching multiply controlled intraverbals to children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders

“…The types of multiple control involved in intraverbals have been conceptualized in terms of conditional discriminations (Axe, ; Michael, Palmer, & Sundberg, ; M. L. Sundberg & Sundberg, ) and compound discriminations (Eikeseth & Smith, ). For example, a child might correctly respond to the two questions “What's something brown?” and “What's an animal?” because each question requires simple discriminations (e.g., “brown” → “chocolate” and “animal” → “polar bear”).…”