Emergent Tact Control Following Stimulus Pairing: Comparison of Procedural Variations

Abstract

We examined emergent tact control following stimulus pairing, using 2 different stimulus presentation arrangements. In the word-first condition, presentation of the auditory stimulus preceded the visual stimulus, and in the image-first condition, the visual stimulus preceded the auditory stimulus. Eight children (2-5 years old) participated. In Experiment 1, 4 children were exposed to 3 sessions in each condition with a new set of stimuli in each session. In Experiment 2, 2 of the same children received repeated exposure to the same stimulus sets. Experiment 3, with new participants, was identical to Experiment 1, except visual and auditory stimuli overlapped during the presentation. Postsession probes documented emergent stimulus control over 1 or more vocal responses for 7 of the 8 participants. Participants were more likely to make echoic responses with the visual stimulus present in the word-first condition; however, emergent tact control was unaffected by the order of the stimulus presentation. Additional research is needed on stimulus-pairing procedures and on the role of echoic responding in emergent tact control.Keywords Children . Naming . Stimulus pairing . Tact . Verbal behavior The "tact" was defined by Skinner (1957) as a verbal operant in which the response form is controlled by "a particular object or event or a property of the object or event" (pp. 81-82). Although Skinner considered operant reinforcement to be primarily responsible for establishing the stimulus control that defines the tact (hereafter referred to as "tact control"), he also acknowledged (Skinner, 1957, pp. 359-360) that this type of stimulus control sometimes emerges without any apparent reinforcement of the target response form in the presence of the relevant stimulus. More recent behavioranalytic theories have hypothesized that emergent tact control is a product of a higher order (Horne & Lowe, 1996) or a generalized (e.g.,

The Use of Instructive Feedback to Promote Emergent Tact and Intraverbal Control: A Replication

“…Contrary to emergence following just one intervention series, our participants required multiple intervention series before we observed emergent responding. That is, repeated stimulus pairings of the S D and the feature tact were required before participants responded correctly during probes (Petursdottir et al, 2020 ). The current study extended Frampton and Shillingsburg by adding fill-in intraverbal probes because these may emerge before Wh- intraverbals (Sundberg & Sundberg, 2011 ).…”

“…Instructive feedback (IF) can be incorporated into DTI, which expands a DTI trial by adding an additional instructional target(s) (i.e., secondary targets; the instructional target in a DTI trial is referred to as a primary target). Stimulus pairing is used to present secondary targets (Petursdottir et al, 2020 ), and presentations can be programmed in the antecedent or consequence portion of a DTI trial (see Nottingham et al, 2017 and Vladescu & Kodak, 2013 for variations in IF placement). Contrary to the requirement of a learner to respond to the primary target, the learner is not required to respond to the secondary target in IF.…”

“…Attending to the visual stimulus and emitting covert or overt echoic and self-echoic responses may create the conditions necessary for bidirectional naming (responding as a speaker following listener discrimination training and vice versa; Miguel, 2016 ), which could be important for acquisition of secondary and emergent targets with IF (Dass et al, 2018 ). Specifically, emergent tact control after IF delivery (i.e., stimulus pairing) may be a special subtype of bidirectional naming (Petursdottir et al, 2020 , p. 194). Therefore, we included participants who demonstrated bidirectional naming, required attending to the visual stimulus prior to IF presentation, and measured the occurrence of overt echoics.…”

Nonsimultaneous stimulus presentations and their role in listener naming

“…Although the current nonsimultaneous method of presenting names and objects is yet to be tested with a sample of children with disabilities, the study offers a potential method for practitioners to train and establish derived listener responses of increasing complexity should they fail to emerge in such children. Further, the methods described here adopt a naturalistic format for practitioners to provide naming experiences with brief intertrial intervals that involve other activities and without mass name-object exposure trials that are typical of laboratory experiments (e.g., Byrne et al, 2014;Petursdottir et al, 2020). Finally, if future studies employing the nonsimultaneous presentation technique confirm the emergence of echoic responding during training and/or testing (even when procedures do not explicitly require doing so), this could have potential implications for interventions for children.…”

“…For example, researchers have used match-tosample tasks such as the one described above in the Gilic and Greer (2011) study, and the stimulus pairing procedure described in the Luciano et al (2007) study. Petursdottir et al (2020) evaluated procedural variations of the stimulus pairing procedure in which the name was either presented before the image or after the image, and with or without a temporal overlap between the word and the image. They found that speaker responses were unaffected by the order of stimulus presentation, and the best outcomes were reported when there was an overlap between the word and the image.…”