Intraverbal

In a replication of Daly and K. Dounavi (2020), the researchers evaluated the effect of foreign tact and bidirectional intraverbal teaching on the emergence of untaught relations. Three university students learned three stimulus sets through three types of teaching: native-foreign intraverbal teaching (vocalizing Spanish words that refer to a Japanese textual stimulus), foreign-native intraverbal teaching (reversed relation of native-foreign condition), and foreign-tact teaching (tacting a picture in Spanish)...

Rodriguez et al. (2022) discovered that teaching four component skills was sufficient to facilitate the emergence of intraverbal tacts across four applications with three participants. Our study replicated and evaluated an extension of this procedure that was directed at facilitating intraverbal tacts when a child learns the component skills but continues to fail to produce intraverbal tacts. The extension consisted of procedures to enhance the divergent control exerted by the auditory stimulus (i.e., the question) and the discriminability of joint control...

This study aimed to compare the effects of echoic and listener responding in the emergence of complex intraverbal behavior in four children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Each participant was taught to provide an echoic response or a listener response for different discriminative stimuli for each condition. We used a nonconcurrent multiple probe design across participants and adapted an alternating treatment design to compare the effects between the two conditions. Pre- and posttests were used to evaluate the effects of the two different prompt types in the emergence of complex intraverbals...

Interventions involving precision teaching (PT) and fluency-based instruction may promote the acquisition of intraverbal repertoires. We examined the effects of tact fluency training on the emergence of untrained intraverbal component-composite relations for three participants with autism and mild to moderate intellectual disability. We used a multiple-probes across participants design across the three participants, with additional replication across thematic clusters for one participant. The results suggest a relation between tact fluency training and the emergence of untrained intraverbal responses may exist...

The acquisition of verbal behavior is complex and requires the analysis of myriad variables. Ernst Moerk estimated that by the time a child has reached 4 years of age they have experienced nearly 9 million language learning trials with mothers using at least 14 categories of maternal teaching interactions. The interactions provide a foundation for children learning the tact, mand, echoic, intraverbal, autoclitic, and other relations, described by Skinner in Verbal Behavior . Here we examine two relations that have been overlooked to some extent and arguably account for many of the generative features of verbal behavior and shared meaning: the abstract tact, or more precisely the interdimensional abstract tact, and the autoclitic frame...

The purpose of this review was to assess the effectiveness of tablet-based speech-generating devices (SGDs) in improving communication skills for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A total of 31 single-case design intervention studies involving 84 individuals with ASD were reviewed and included in the analysis. We calculated Tau-U to evaluate the impact of interventions involving tablet-based SGDs on four different communication responses: specifically, mands, intraverbals, tacts, and vocalizations...

UNLABELLED: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may struggle with verbal behavior related to recall in various contexts. However, relatively little research has evaluated methods for improving recall among this population, and even fewer from a verbal behavior perspective. One socially important set of skills that relies upon a behavioral repertoire of recall is applied reading skills, such as reading comprehension and story recall. Valentino et al. (2015) designed an intervention package to teach children with ASD to recall short stories and conceptualized the behavior as an intraverbal chain...

Although many neurotypical children acquire untaught word-object relations incidentally from naturally occurring environmental experiences, many children with and without developmental disabilities require specific intervention. This study examined the effects of rotating listener (match and point) and speaker (tact and intraverbal-tact) responses with added echoics during multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) with training sets of stimuli on the acquisition of Incidental Bidirectional Naming (Inc-BiN). Listener-speaker MEI procedures reported in Hawkins et al...

In simultaneous prompting procedures, an immediate (i.e., 0-s) prompt is presented during all training trials, and transfer to the target discriminative condition is assessed during daily probes. Previous research suggests that simultaneous prompting procedures are efficacious and may produce acquisition in fewer errors to mastery when compared to prompt delay procedures. To date, only a single study on simultaneous prompting has included intraverbal targets. The current study evaluated the efficacy of a simultaneous prompting procedure on the acquisition of intraverbal synonyms for six children at risk for reading failure...

An intraverbal assessment was administered to older adults with aphasia, using a hierarchy of questions that required increasingly complex verbal discriminative stimulus control. Five categories of errors were defined and analyzed for putative stimulus control, with the aim to identify requisite assessment components leading to more efficient and effective treatments. Evocative control over intraverbal error responses was evident throughout the database, as shown by commonalities within four distinct categories of errors; a fifth category, representing a narrow majority of errors, was less clear in terms of functional control over responses...

The aim of this study was to compare language abilities in 4-6-year-old Georgian-speaking children with typical language development (TLD), expressive language disorder (ELD), and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Language linguistic components, such as phonology, semantics, syntax, morphology, and pragmatics, were examined along with verbal behavior types like "mand," "tact," "echoic," and "intraverbal." Our sample comprised 148 children, with a gender distribution of 50 girls and 98 boys. Significant differences were observed in the application of various parts of speech across the three groups...

Intraverbal behavior is a type of verbal behavior in which the response form has no point-to-point correspondence with its verbal stimulus. However, the form and occurrence of most intraverbals is under the control of multiple variables. Establishing this form of multiple control may depend on a variety of preestablished skills. The purpose of Experiment 1 was to evaluate these potential prerequisites with adult participants using a multiple probe design. The results suggest that training was not required for each putative prerequisite...

UNLABELLED: This systematic review evaluated the effects of foreign tact training on emergent learning outcomes in ten published studies. We also conducted a meta-analysis of aggregate data from seven studies comparing outcomes of foreign tact training with other verbal operant procedures. The preliminary findings indicated foreign tact training produced criterion-level responses in 84 of 106 (79.2%) post-test probes across 37 learners and 55 evaluations of foreign tact training. The meta-analysis results revealed significantly higher within-subjects mean levels of emergent responding following foreign tact training than foreign-to-native intraverbal, native-to-foreign intraverbal, and foreign listener training...

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the effects of tact and match-to-sample instructions on the increase and maintenance of intraverbal responses to subcategorical questions (i.e., naming multiple items in a subcategory of a category). Three Chinese children on the autism spectrum (2 boys, 1 girl, aged 6-8 years old) participated in this study. Results indicated that intraverbal responses to subcategorical questions emerged or increased for most subcategories for all three participants following the completion of instruction without direct training...

Individuals with conversation skill deficits often have difficulties discriminating cues of interest and uninterest from their conversation partner(s). We used behavioral skills training (BST) to teach 3 individuals with autism spectrum disorder to converse about the conversation partner's topics of interest, initiate strategic preferred topics to identify shared interests after indices of uninterest, and end the conversation. We assessed generality of each skill across conversation partners and ratings of social acceptability...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1007/s10882-022-09859-4.].

Control by compound antecedent stimuli in verbal behavior represents an understudied but promising area of research. To date, reference to compound verbal stimulus control has generally only included descriptions of convergent multiple control. A sizeable experimental literature exists on the topic of compound stimulus control, which differs from convergent multiple control in that the stimulus elements often do not have a prior conditioning history (i.e., do not separately strengthen any response). The current study attempted to bridge the experimental and verbal behavior literatures by including a two-component antecedent verbal stimulus during intraverbal training for which neither component currently served an evocative function...

There is a growing body of evidence supporting the use of telehealth to provide parent training in behaviour analytic interventions and researchers have begun to focus on international demonstrations of this model. The current study assessed the efficacy of a training package focused on naturalistic teaching strategies designed to upskill parents of children with autism spectrum disorder and provide them with ready to use strategies to increase social communication behaviours across verbal operants. Two parent-child dyads were trained to increase mand, tact and intraverbals during play...

Instructive feedback (IF) involves incorporating additional acquisition targets into skill-acquisition programs. A recent study by Frampton and Shillingsburg (2020) found that IF led to emergent verbal operants with two elementary-aged children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The current study replicated Frampton and Shillingsburg with two children with ASD. Therapists conducted sessions of mastered listener-by-name trials (e.g., "Show me otter," with pictures of otter, dog, and elephant) with IF statements for features of the target stimuli (e...

Mastery criteria can be applied to individual targets or stimuli organized into sets. Wong et al. (2021) and Wong and Fienup (2022) found that participants who received special education services learned sight words more rapidly when an individual target mastery criterion was applied. The current study replicated and extended these findings across novel skills. Five participants with ASD received tact or intraverbal training in Experiment 1, and 2 participants with ASD received auditory-visual conditional discrimination training (AVCD) in Experiment 2...