Producing Generative Sentence Usage by Imitation and Reinforcement Procedures1

Abstract

Three retarded subjects and two developmentally normal toddlers were trained using imitation and reinforcement procedures to use correct sentences. The experimental task was to use sentences with correct subject‐verb agreement to describe pictures that were presented to the subjects. Two classes of sentences were taught: those involving a plural subject that required the use of the verb “are” (for example, “the boys are running”) and those involving a singular subject that required the use of the verb “is” (for example, “the boy is running”). The basic design of the study involved multiple baselines for each class of sentences. Four of the subjects began to produce novel, untrained sentences of a particular type to generalization probe pictures when that particular class of sentence was currently being trained. Thus, the imitation and reinforcement procedures appeared to be functional in producing generative sentence usage for both types of sentences. One subject produced correct sentences to both singular and plural probe pictures when only “is” sentences had been taught. A reversal procedure and retraining phase indicated that for this subject, imitation and reinforcement procedures for training one class of sentence behavior seemed functional in producing generative responses of the other class of sentences.

Matrix Training and Verbal Generativity in Children with Autism

“…This is perhaps the most unique and important feature of language and has been referred to as generative language (e.g., Goldstein 1984;Lutzker and Sherman 1974;Stewart, McElwee, and Ming 2013), linguistic productivity (Hockett 1960;Malott 2003;Whaley and Malott 1971), generative grammar (Chomsky 1959), or recombinative generalization (e.g., Goldstein 1983a;Goldstein 1983b;Goldstein 1984;Goldstein and Brown 1989;Goldstein and Mousetis 1989). According to Lutzker and Sherman (1974), "generative language simply means the appearance of novel language responses within the language repertoire of the child that have not been modeled or directly trained, but that may be related to other language responses" (p. 447). The basic behavioral processes underlying generative language have yet to be clarified to everyone's satisfaction, but generative language should not be confused with simple stimulus or response generalization because correct novel response sequences are no more physically similar to the training sequences than are incorrect response sequences (Stewart et al 2013).…”

Behavior Analytic Studies of Creativity: A Critical Review

“…Two additional, related areas of research in behavior analysis are clearly relevant to an extended analysis of creativity, but have not been considered in this review: studies of mediated transfer and conditional discrimination (e.g., Sidman, 1974Sidman, , 1985, and studies of generative responding in language training (e.g., Endo & Sloane, 1982;Lutzker & Sherman, 1974). These areas ofresearch both deal with the development of new stimulus control relationships and the emergence of untrained responses, and this work may therefore provide a basic analysis of the process by which novel, creative responses emerge.…”

Three Myths from the Language Acquisition Literature

“…A generative productive plural usage resulted, the girl correctly labeling new objects in the singular or plural without further direct training relevant to those objects. (p. 297) Similarly, reinforcement was used to establish the generative usage of descriptive adjectives by disadvantaged preschool children (Hart & Risley, 1968); complete sentences in a speech-deficient child (Wheeler & Sulzer, 1970); verb usage in retarded children (Schumaker & Sherman, 1970); is and the in a hearing-impaired preschooler (Bennett & Ling, 1972); is and are by both retarded subjects and developmentally normal toddlers (Lutzker & Sherman, 1974); and adjective-noun combinations and compound sentences by disadvantaged children (Hart & Risley, 1974, 1975. Other studies reporting the use of reinforcement procedures to bolster grammaticality also appeared around this time (e.g., H. B.…”