Purpose: This investigation examined the effect of repeated exposure to novel and repeated spoken words in typical environments on the intelligibility of 2 synthesized voices and human recorded speech in preschools. Method: Eighteen preschoolers listened to and repeated single words presented in human-recorded speech, DECtalk Paul, and AT&T Voice…

A pupil's ability to identify common organisms is necessary for acquiring further knowledge of biology. We investigated how pupils were able to identify 25 bird species following their song, growth habits, or both features presented simultaneously. Just about 19% of birds were successfully identified by song, about 39% by growth habit, and 45% of…

We evaluated the influence of two different frequencies of data collection on skill acquisition and maintenance within behavioral treatment programs for children with autism spectrum disorders. Six children were taught multiple skills in up to four different behavioral programs. Half of the skills were measured continuously (i.e., trial by trial),…

Previous evidence shows that nouns are easier for many language users to retrieve than verbs, but scant research has been conducted with children in bilectal environments (where both standard and non-standard forms of a language are spoken). This study investigates object and action naming in children who are native speakers of a non-standard…

Although Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" (1957) was published over 50 years ago, behavior-analytic research on human language and cognition has been slow to develop. In recent years, a new behavioral approach to language known as relational frame theory (RFT) has generated considerable attention, research, and debate. The controversy surrounding RFT…

B. F. Skinner's first public exposition of his analysis of verbal behavior was the "Hefferline Notes" (1947a), a written summary of a course Skinner taught at Columbia University during the summer of 1947 just prior to his presentation of the William James Lectures at Harvard University in the fall. The Notes are significant because they display…

The authors show that a narrowband noise (NBN) is perceived as longer when presented immediately after a wideband noise (WBN), compared to when the WBN is absent. This effect depended on the WBN's frequency spectrum overlapping that of the NBN, and it increased as the duration of the WBN increased up to 300 ms. It decreased when a silent gap was…

Conflict-related cognitive processes are critical for adapting to sudden environmental changes that confront the individual with inconsistent or ambiguous information. Thus, these processes play a crucial role to cope with daily life. Generally, conflicts tend to accumulate especially in complex and threatening situations. Therefore, the question…

Previous studies have identified a number of effective teaching procedures to increase verbal behavior in individuals with developmental disabilities. However, few studies have evaluated modifications of treatment procedures when children fail to acquire communication skills. In the present investigation, a 4-year-old boy with autism failed to…

If stimulus equivalence is a model of meaning, abstract stimuli should acquire the meaning of meaningful stimuli equivalent to them. In Experiment 1, college students matched faces expressing emotions to arbitrary pictures, forming three classes of equivalent stimuli, each comprising an emotional expression and three arbitrary pictures. Semantic…

Acquisition and maintenance of touch-screen responding was examined in naive cynomolgus monkeys ("Macaca fascicularis") under automaintenance and classical conditioning arrangements. In the first condition of Experiment 1, we compared acquisition of screen touching to a randomly positioned stimulus (a gray square) that was either stationary or…

Studies of derived relational responding and stimulus equivalence that examine the acquisition of arbitrary stimuli into existing classes suggest that classes that are more emotionally salient facilitate the acquisition of novel members. This study examined the hypothesis that personal distress would create facilitated acquisition in deriving…

Five minutes of processing the local features of a Navon letter causes a detriment in subsequent face-recognition performance (Macrae & Lewis, 2002). We hypothesize a perceptual after effect explanation of this effect in which face recognition is less accurate after adapting to high-spatial frequencies at high contrasts. Five experiments were…

The "mere exposure effect" refers to the phenomenon where previous exposures to stimuli increase participants' subsequent affective preference for those stimuli. This study explored the effect of selective attention on the mere exposure effect. The experiments manipulated the to-be-attended drawings in the exposure period (either red or green…

The neural bases of prosody during the production of literal and idiomatic interpretations of literally plausible idioms was investigated. Left- and right-hemisphere-damaged participants and normal controls produced literal and idiomatic versions of idioms ("He hit the books.") All groups modulated duration to distinguish the interpretations. LHD…