Stimulus equivalence seems to have relevance to the study of semantics and of language more generally. If so, there may be a relation between language use and the demonstration of stimulus equivalence. This was examined in three groups of children ranging in chronological age and matched on a conventional measure of mental age: normally developing preschoolers, retarded children who used speech or signs spontaneously and appropriately, and retarded children who did not. All children were taught a series of four related discriminations and were then tested to determine if classes of equivalent stimuli had formed. All of the language-able children (retarded and normal) formed equivalence classes, whereas none of the language-disabled children did so. Although the exact nature of the relation between stimulus equivalence and language remains to be clarified, these results support the view that stimulus equivalence is a phenomenon with relevance to language.

In practical terms, the sine qua non of the modes, methods, devices, strategies, and theories of clinical assessment is their contribution to treatment outcome. The importance of this contribution has often been noted, but under many different labels and rationales. The resultant conceptual confusion has considerably restricted the visibility and frequency of research in this critical area. In this article we propose a name for the impact of assessment on treatment outcome: the "treatment utility of assessment. "' Some of the questions that can be asked about the treatment utility of assessment are described, and methods appropriate for asking them are examined. Finally, the implications of this kind of utility for other approaches to evaluating assessment quality are analyzed.

Self-monitoring is the procedure by which individuals record the occurrences of their own target behaviors. In addition to providing a source of data, self-monitoring is also used as a therapeutic strategy because it often causes reactive behavior changes in response frequency. Three alternative viewpoints to account for this reactivity are presented. Kanfer's position (1970a, 1970b, 1975, 1977) is that the self-monitoring response leads to self-evaluation and self-administered consequences that alter response frequency. Rachlin (1974) holds that the self-monitoring response cues the ultimate environmental consequences that control behavior rate. In an extension of Rachlin's view, Hayes and Nelson (1977) propose that the entire self-monitoring process (therapist instructions, training, self-recording device, self-monitoring responses) prompts the external consequences that control behavior frequency. This extension provides theoretical parsimony in positing environmental antecedents as well as consequences for reactivity. The extension also best accounts for data in which reactivity is not linked to the occurrence of the self-monitoring responses (i.e., reactivity occurs despite inaccurate self-monitoring, low frequency behaviors, and unused self-monitoring devices). Similarly, this view accounts for the parallel effects produced when monitoring is done by external agents.

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This special issue of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis provides the reader with a sample of current work in behavioral assessment. The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of behavioral assessment and to place the other articles in context of this developing area.