This study investigated the effects of tact prompts on the acquisition and retention of divergent intraverbal responding to categorical questions involving conditional discriminations. A 6-year-old boy with autism participated in the study. A multiple probe design across behaviors was used. A tact-prompt procedure was implemented. The results…

Paired-associate learning is a dynamic measure of the ability to form new links between two items. This study aimed to investigate whether paired-associate learning ability is associated with success in orthographic learning, and if so, whether it accounts for unique variance beyond phonological decoding ability and orthographic knowledge. A group…

To navigate a world filled with private property, children must be able to assign ownership information to objects and update that information when appropriate. In this chapter, the authors propose that children include ownership as an attribute of their object representations. Children can learn about ownership attributes either by witnessing…

Naming appears to be the source of the explosion in language development and involves the integration of the initially separate listener and speaker responses. This integration has a role in the development of reading, writing, and the following and construction of verbal algorithms that make types of complex human behavior possible. Considerable…

Cognitive strategies are important tools for children with math difficulties (MD) in learning to solve word problems. The effectiveness of strategy training, however, depends on working memory capacity (WMC). Thus, children with MD but with relatively higher WMC are more likely to benefit from strategy training, whereas children with lower WMC may…

Many students with cognitive impairments are not afforded the opportunity to develop their potential as readers. A review of the literature reveals that few researchers have evaluated the effects of phonics instruction on the reading skills of students with cognitive impairments. The purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of a…

We assessed whether 2 preschoolers with autism learned to discriminate between the sounds of musical instruments more rapidly than the spoken names of the instruments. After the children learned the sound-object relations more rapidly than the name-object relations, we then evaluated a prompt-delay procedure for transferring stimulus control from…

Language acquisition has been a contentious topic among linguists, psycholinguists, and behaviorists for decades. Although numerous theories of language acquisition have surfaced, none have sufficiently accounted for the subtleties of the language that children acquire. The present study attempts to explain the role of modeling and automatic…

A major focus of research on language acquisition in infancy involves experimental studies of the infant's ability to discriminate various kinds of speech or speech-like stimuli. This research has demonstrated that infants are sensitive to many fine-grained differences in the acoustic properties of speech utterance. Furthermore, these empirical…

The conceptual basis for many effective language-training programs are based on Skinner's (1957) analysis of verbal behavior. Skinner described several elementary verbal operants including mands, tacts, intraverbals, and echoics. According to Skinner, responses that are the same topography may actually be functionally independent. Previous…

We examined the role of specific therapist verbal behaviors in predicting successful completion of Parent?Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) in 22 families, including 11 families that successfully completed treatment and 11 that discontinued treatment prematurely. The children were 3 to 6 years old and diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder…

Around 5 or 6 years of age, children begin to recognize that speakers who make ironic remarks do not believe what they literally say, but children of the same age do not show appreciation for the humor function of irony (Dews et al., 1996; Harris & Pexman, 2003). We investigated 7- to 10-year-old children's interpretations of verbal irony and…

A multiple baseline design across three parent-child dyads of families with multiple risk factors was used to determine the effectiveness of teaching parents to use milieu language teaching procedures. Parents were taught to use two sets of milieu language teaching skills: responsive interaction and incidental teaching. Results showed that parents…

The very fact that behavior analysts have so carefully analyzed the speaker in terms of maintaining variables, but disregard the listener's behavior as broadly "receptive" unless the listener vocalizes (then applying the operants of the speaker until the listener, stops vocalizing) seems to be missing the point of Skinner's original analysis in…