Reciprocal conversations, instructional activities, and other social interactions are replete with multiply controlled intraverbals, examples of which have been conceptualized in terms of conditional discriminations. Although the acquisition of conditional discriminations has been examined extensively in the behavior-analytic literature, little…

In Experiment 1, "more" and "less" relations were trained for arbitrary Stimuli A1 and A2 with 3 children with autism. The following conditional discriminations were then trained: A1-B1, A2-B2, B1-C1, B2-C2. In subsequent tests, participants showed derived more-less mands (mand with C1 for more and mand with C2 for less). A training procedure…

The investigation sought to teach a sequence of arrival behaviors to a severely mentally retarded 12-year-old child living in an institution. Withdrawal and reintroduction of the pacing prompts established that increases in independent arrival behavior were attributed to the pacing prompts. (Author/SB)

Manipulation of mechanical restraint properties were conducted in separate studies with two profoundly retarded adolescents who exhibited both self-restraint and self-injurious behavior. Techniques included prompting, differential reinforcement, and stimulus fading. Results suggested that stimulus fading and transfer may be valuable components in…

In this study the assumption was tested experimentally, whether prompting for reflection will enhance hypermedia learning and transfer. Students of the experimental group were prompted at each navigation step in a hypermedia system to say the reasons why they chose this specific information node out loud whereas the students of the control group…

A multiply-handicapped totally dependent young adult exhibited a steadily increasing rate of response in learning to turn her radio on and off by moving her head to activate a controlling device mounted on the headrest of her wheelchair. Positive reinforcement, prompting, and fading were employed during the intervention (Author/JW)

Two experiments to replicate P. E. Touchette's findings on the delayed prompt effect, with 34 subjects having mental retardation, found more variable results, with all five of the possible outcomes occurring with some subjects. The paper concludes that successful use of the delayed prompt technique depends on such factors as difficulty of target…

The study assessed the efficacy of time delay and peer modeling procedures in increasing spontaneous verbalizations of affection in four autistic children (ages 6-8). Results indicated that the time delay was a quick and effective procedure for all subjects. Peer modeling was unsuccessful in teaching the target behavior. (Author)

In this article infant operant conditioning studies are grouped according to distinct procedures: free operant; discrete trial with one discriminative stimulus; discrete trial with two or more discriminative stimuli; controlled operant with two or more discriminative stimuli; and unrestricted operant with two or more discriminative stimuli.…

The study sought to identify effective procedures for facilitating initial imitative vocal behavior in mentally retarded children, thus accelerating the initial stages of language acquisition. Three groups of Down syndrome children ages 6 months to 4 years (N=15) served as subjects in an examination of the relative effectiveness of three…