Teaching tact and intraverbal responses based on function-feature-class to children with language delays can result in the emergence of untrained relational responses. The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of compound stimuli in discriminated operants (i.e., different combinations of hear, see, touch, and taste) on the acquisition…

It is important for children to learn to identify safety stimuli in their environment; however, there has been limited research in the field of behavior analysis related to effective and efficient strategies for teaching these skills to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Although previous research has demonstrated the effectiveness of…

Vocal exchanges are often comprised of responses under multiple sources of stimulus control. For example, a picture may contain multiple components, and an instructor may ask a learner to respond differentially to questions about the picture (e.g., "who," "what," "where," "color," "number,"…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may have difficulty acquiring intraverbal behavior. The present study compared manipulations of stimulus salience (i.e., volume increase, elongation) to teach intraverbals (e.g., "You drink [juice]" and "You drink from [cup]") to three participants diagnosed with ASD whose…

Researchers have demonstrated the efficacy of picture prompts on the acquisition of intraverbals (Coon & Miguel in "Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis," 45, 657-666, 2012; Goldsmith, LeBlanc, & Sautter in "Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders," 1, 1-13, 2007; Ingvarsson & Hollobaugh in "Journal of Applied…

The present study evaluated the efficacy of equivalence-based instruction (EBI) as described in the PEAK-E curriculum (Dixon, 2015) for promoting the emergence of derived geometry skills in two children with high-functioning autism. The results suggested that direct training of shape name (A) to shape property (B) (i.e., A-B relations) was…

The present study evaluated the efficacy of a stimulus-equivalence training procedure in teaching basic geography skills to two children with autism. The procedures were taken directly from a standardized training curriculum based in stimulus equivalence theory called "Promoting the Emergence of Advanced Knowledge Equivalence Module"…

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…

Prior research found that without the naming cusp, children did not learn from instructional demonstrations presented before learn units (IDLUs) (i.e., modeling an expected response twice for a learner prior to delivering an instructional antecedent), however, following the establishment of naming, they could. The present study was designed to…

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…

Echoic, tact, and textual transfer procedures have been proven successful in establishing simple intraverbals (Braam and Poling "Applied Research in Mental Retardation," 4, 279-302, 1983; Luciano "Applied Research in Mental Retardation," 102, 346-357, 1986; Watkins et al. "The Analysis of Verbal Behavior," 7, 69-81,…

Effective intraverbal responding often requires control by multiple elements of a verbal stimulus. The purpose of this study was to examine the emergence of such intraverbal relations following tact instruction with compound stimuli and to analyze any resulting error patterns. Participants were seven typically developing children between 3 and…

Millions of Americans are diagnosed with dementia, and that number is only expected to rise. The diagnosis of dementia comes with impairments, especially in language. Furthermore, dementia-related functional declines appear to be moderated by environmental variables (Alzheimer's Association, "Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the…

Mand training is often a primary focus in early language instruction and typically includes mands that are positively reinforced. However, mands maintained by negative reinforcement are also important skills to teach. These include mands to escape aversive demands or unwanted items. Another type of negatively reinforced mand important to teach…

With an emphasis on procedural fundamentals, the original behavior-analytic equivalence experiments and the equivalence paradigm are described briefly. A few of the subsequent developments and implications are noted, with special reference to the possible significance of the findings with respect to language and cognition. (Contains 9 figures.)