Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may have difficulty acquiring intraverbal behavior. The present study compared manipulations of stimulus salience (i.e., volume increase, elongation) to teach intraverbals (e.g., "You drink [juice]" and "You drink from [cup]") to three participants diagnosed with ASD whose…

The importance of the intraverbal relation is missed in most theories of language. Skinner (1957) attributes this to traditional semantic theories of meaning that focus on the nonverbal referents of words and neglect verbal stimuli as separate sources of control for linguistic behavior. An analysis of verbal stimulus control is presented, along…

We evaluated the use of a blocked-trials procedure to establish complex stimulus control over intraverbal responses. The participants were four young boys with a diagnosis of autism who had struggled to master intraverbals. The blocked-trials procedures involved presentation of stimuli in separate trial blocks. The trial blocks gradually reduced…

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…

We evaluated the effects of operant discrimination training (ODT) on the vocalizations of 3 boys with autism. We compared ODT to a stimulus-stimulus pairing (SSP) condition and a control condition in an adapted alternating-treatments design. ODT increased the target vocalizations of all participants compared to the control condition, and its…

This investigation evaluated the use of conditional discrimination (CD) instruction and multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) to establish derived relational responding in accordance with hierarchical frames with school aged children. The first experiment used a multiple probe design to evaluate the effectiveness of MEI to teach participants to…

In the fall of 2003, the authors corresponded on the topic of private events on the listserv of the Verbal Behavior Special Interest Group. Extracts from that correspondence raised questions about the role of response amplitude in determining units of analysis, whether private events can be investigated directly, and whether covert behavior…

The researchers explored factors related to negativism in 27 elementary age autistic children, where negativism was defined as the consistent avoidance of a correct response in a multiple choice discrimination task. (Author)

Utilizing careful, empirical definitions of lesson kinetic structure, the authors tested two hypotheses: student content achievement is directly related to lesson content structure; and, awareness of commonality and theme development is directly related to lesson content structure. Student achievement seems to be related to communication…

First-grade boys (N=260) were classified according to response style on a continuum of reflectivity-impulsivity using Kagan's Matching Familiar Figures Test. For all groups, performances were poorest under reward conditions and better under the punishment and reward plus punishment conditions. (ST)

In Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior, three categories of environmental control over instances of verbal behavior appear to be relevant to the study of infant vocal development: the mand, the tact, and the echoic categories. Procedures used in the remediation of language deficiencies and procedures found in work in the area of language…