Effects of Collateral Response Requirements and Exemplar Training on Listener Training Outcomes in Children

Abstract

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.

Emergent Tact Control Following Stimulus Pairing: Comparison of Procedural Variations

“…Potential implications for the role of echoic responding should be tempered in light of the issues described previously, as each of the three experiments had its own strengths and limitations. However, they fail to provide support for the notion that echoic responses during pairing are crucial to later tact emergence (Horne & Lowe, 1996), and as such, they are consistent with the results of other studies that have attempted to document this functional role (Byrne et al, 2014;Carp et al, 2015;Delfs et al, 2014;Haq et al, 2017;Olaff & Holth, 2020;Petursdottir et al, 2014). Anecdotally, some of the incorrect responses of our participants also seem to contradict this role of echoic responding.…”

“…First, the effects of requiring echoic responses during stimulus pairing or listener instruction should be evaluated further, incorporating control conditions that attempt to interfere with or block echoic responses. The occurrence of echoic responses at the covert level when they were not required may explain the negative results of previous studies that have evaluated echoic response requirements (e.g., Petursdottir et al, 2014), and interfering with that behavior could potentially reveal an effect. A recent study (Dressel, Nicholson, Albert, & Ryan, 2019) found that blocking echoic responses during stimulus pairing did not interfere with emergent intraverbal control in an instructive feedback procedure; however, no similar research has been published on emergent tact control.…”

“…At the overt level, the occurrence of echoic responses as children are exposed to stimulus pairing or listener instruction has been found to be uncorrelated (Delfs et al, 2014;Haq et al, 2017;Olaff & Holth, 2020) or negatively correlated (Byrne et al, 2014) with the subsequent emergence of tact control. In addition, requiring children to make echoic responses during listener instruction trials has been found to produce inconsistent effects or no effects on tact emergence (Carp, Peterson, Petursdottir, & Ingvarsson, 2015, Experiment 2;Ezell & Goldstein, 1989;Petursdottir, Lepper, & Peterson, 2014). It might be argued, however, that echoic responses in these studies could have occurred at the covert level when they were not observed or not required at the overt level, resulting in the failure to detect an effect.…”

Recent research on the relative efficiency of speaker and listener instruction for children with autism spectrum disorder

“…Neither study found a consistent relationship between collateral responding and emergence. Studies excluded from this review, such as Petursdottir, Lepper, and Peterson (), found that requiring collateral echoic responding during listener training did not result in emergence of speaker responses. Thus, we recommend that researchers begin to look beyond collateral responding as a variable supporting emergence.…”

The Effects of Multiple Exemplar Instruction on the Relation Between Listener and Intraverbal Categorization Repertoires

“…During listener categorization training trials, it may be more effective to train the pointing response, and the autoclitic frame BStimulus is Category.^For example, the experimenter would provide the discriminative stimulus, BWhich one is Africa?^and then train the participant to point to BDurbin,^then vocalize the statement BDurbin is Africa.^Although previous research has indicated that echoic, multiple-tact, and receptive discrimination training does not significantly influence the emission of intraverbal behavior (Miguel et al 2005;Petursdottir et al 2014), perhaps embedding this training as an autoclitic frame in an alternating format with intraverbal categorization trials in the context of MEI may teach the child to emit relevant responses that would generate stimulus control over categorization responding and result in emergent intraverbal categorization.…”