Naming refers to the incidental acquisition of word-object relations as listener and speaker without explicit reinforcement. To investigate possible sources of reinforcement for naming, we examined the effects of a procedure for conditioning reinforcement for observing responses on the emergence of naming in children who previously lacked it. The…

Prior research has demonstrated the establishment of reinforcers for learning and maintenance with young children as a function of social learning where a peer and an adult experimenter were present. The presence of an adult experimenter was eliminated in the present study to test if the effect produced in the prior studies would occur with only…

We tested the effects of an observational intervention (Greer & Singer-Dudek, 2008) on establishing children's books as conditioned reinforcers using a delayed multiple baseline design. Three preschool students with mild language and developmental delays served as the participants. Prior to the intervention, books did not function as reinforcers…

We used a delayed non-concurrent pre- and post-intervention probe design to test the effects of a voice conditioning protocol (VCP) with 3 preschoolers with autism on (a) rate of acquisition of listener curricular objectives, (b) observing voices and the presence of adults across 3 settings, (c) selecting to listen to adults tell stories in free…

We report an experiment in which observations of peers by six 3-5-year-old participants under specific conditions functioned to convert a small plastic disc or, for one participant, a small piece of string, from a nonreinforcer to a reinforcer. Prior to the observational procedure, we compared each participant's responding on (a) previously…

We report an experiment investigating the effects of conditioning books as reinforcers for observing responses on the learning of textual responses by pre-school children. The independent variable was the acquisition of conditioned reinforcement of observing responses and choice of book stimuli in free play settings where children could choose to…

In 2 multiple baseline experiments, we tested stimulus-stimulus pairing effects on acquisition of conditioned reinforcement for observing and manipulating stimuli and stereotypy/passivity. In Experiment I we studied a 5 year-old male with autism and we collected data using continuous 5-sec whole interval recording in 5 min sessions in which the…