Although small children have autobiographical memories, as they grow, they forget its specific details. Although this forgetting is common in early childhood, the presence of effective cues may help recall autobiographical memories. This study examines the effect of verbal and visual cues on the long-term maintenance of a school trip…

I conducted a descriptive study consisting of 30 preschool participants with and without disabilities to examine the relation between the 3 bidirectional operants. The bidirectional operants were speaker-as-own-listener cusps, which included bidirectional verbal operants between people, bidirectional self-talk conversational units, and…

Young children with autism may fail to mand using a range of frames (e.g., "I want," "May I have," "Please give me"). We examined the effects of simultaneous script training and script fading on acquisition and maintenance of varied mand frames with six preschool children with autism. For participants who did not…

Axe (2008) speculated that some instances of intraverbal responding might be associated with limited or delayed acquisition because they require discrimination of multiple components of verbal stimuli. Past studies suggest that acquisition of responses under control of complex, multicomponent antecedent stimuli (e.g., conditional or compound…

For adults, verbal reminders provide a powerful key to unlock our memories. For example, a simple question, such as "Do you remember your wedding day?" can reactivate rich memories of the past, allowing us to recall experiences that may have occurred days, weeks, and even decades earlier. The ability to use another person's language to…

Studies that have compared the effectiveness of differing prompt types to teach intraverbal responses have yielded mixed results, suggesting that individuals' reinforcement histories with prompt types may influence which prompt will be most effective. The purpose of this study was to test whether programmed increases in exposure to specific prompt…

This study replicated and extended Wright (2006) and Whitehurst, Ironsmith, and Goldfein (1974) by examining whether preschool aged children would increase their use of passive grammatical voice rather than using the more age-appropriate active grammatical construction when the former was modeled by an adult. Results showed that 5 of the 6…

We report 2 experiments that tested the effects of multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) across training sets on the emergence of productive autoclitic frames (suffixes) for 6 preschoolers with and without language-based disabilities. We implemented multiple exemplar tact instruction with subsets of stimuli whose "names" contained the suffix "-er"…

We used a delayed non-concurrent pre- and post-intervention probe design to test the effects of a voice conditioning protocol (VCP) with 3 preschoolers with autism on (a) rate of acquisition of listener curricular objectives, (b) observing voices and the presence of adults across 3 settings, (c) selecting to listen to adults tell stories in free…

The purpose of this series of experiments was to evaluate the effects of mixed mand-tact arrangements on the acquisition of mands and tacts in preschool-aged children. In Experiment 1, the effects of three training arrangements (mand-only training, tact-only training, and mand-tact training) were investigated with 3 typically developing children.…

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…

The effects of vocal intraverbal training and listener training on the emergence of untrained categorization skills were evaluated. Five typically developing preschool children initially learned to name a number of previously unfamiliar visual stimuli. Each child then received one of two types of training. Intraverbal training involved reinforcing…

In this study the effect of a stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure was used as part of a clinical investigation to increase vocalizations for two young children diagnosed with autism. This procedure involved pairing a vocal sound with a preferred stimulus (e.g., toy) to condition automatic reinforcement. In addition, this study assessed the effects…

The current study examined the effectiveness of an experimental functional analysis for assessing the functions of emergent vocal-verbal behavior in children with developmental disabilities. Experiment 1 consisted of a systematic replication of Lerman et al. (2005). Participants were 3 children with developmental disabilities, between the ages of…

We evaluated the effects of 2 types of training on the emergence of bidirectional intraverbal relations with 4 typically developing children. Tact training involved reinforcing foreign-language vocalizations in the presence of visual stimuli, and listener training involved reinforcing selections of visual stimuli following vocal presentations of…