Autoclitics are secondary verbal operants that are controlled by a feature of the conditions that occasion or evoke a primary verbal operant such as a tact or mand. Qualifying autoclitics extend, negate, or assert a speaker's primary verbal response and modify the intensity or direction of the listener's behavior. Howard and Rice (1988)…

Teaching job-related problem-solving skills may increase the likelihood that individuals with developmental disabilities obtain and maintain employment (Kaye et al., 2011; Peck & Kirkbride, 2001; Unger, 2002). In this study, we evaluated the use of electronic-based flowcharts on an iPod Touch as a form of self-instruction to increase problem…

Convergent intraverbals represent a specific type of intraverbal in which multiple components of one speaker's verbal behavior control a specific verbal response from another speaker (e.g., Speaker 1: What wooly, horned animal lives in the high country? Speaker 2: Bighorn sheep). To foster the development of advanced language, Sundberg and…

Studies that have compared the effectiveness of differing prompt types to teach intraverbal responses have yielded mixed results, suggesting that individuals' reinforcement histories with prompt types may influence which prompt will be most effective. The purpose of this study was to test whether programmed increases in exposure to specific prompt…

Previous research on the acquisition of verbal behavior in children with developmental disabilities has focused on teaching four primary verbal operants: (1) "mand"; (2) "tact"; (3) "echoic"; and (4) "intraverbal". In Skinner's (1957) analysis of verbal behavior, he stated that each verbal operant is maintained by unique antecedent and consequence…

This study sought to examine the effects of training mands on the emergence of tacts with the same response forms. Results indicated that training adjective sets as mands resulted in the emergence of adjective sets as tacts under modified, but not standard, antecedent conditions. The findings suggested that the apparent functional independence of…

Previous studies have identified a number of effective teaching procedures to increase verbal behavior in individuals with developmental disabilities. However, few studies have evaluated modifications of treatment procedures when children fail to acquire communication skills. In the present investigation, a 4-year-old boy with autism failed to…

We assessed whether 2 preschoolers with autism learned to discriminate between the sounds of musical instruments more rapidly than the spoken names of the instruments. After the children learned the sound-object relations more rapidly than the name-object relations, we then evaluated a prompt-delay procedure for transferring stimulus control from…

Previous research suggests that language-training procedures for children with autism might be enhanced following an assessment of conditions that evoke emerging verbal behavior. The present investigation examined a methodology to teach recognizable mands based on environmental variables known to evoke participants' idiosyncratic communicative…

The effects of vocal intraverbal training and listener training on the emergence of untrained categorization skills were evaluated. Five typically developing preschool children initially learned to name a number of previously unfamiliar visual stimuli. Each child then received one of two types of training. Intraverbal training involved reinforcing…

We evaluated the effects of 2 types of training on the emergence of bidirectional intraverbal relations with 4 typically developing children. Tact training involved reinforcing foreign-language vocalizations in the presence of visual stimuli, and listener training involved reinforcing selections of visual stimuli following vocal presentations of…

This bridge study evaluated the effects of contingency-specifying instructions (CSIs) and incomplete instructions (IIs) in terms of establishing instructional control of appropriate behavior. Results suggested that instructional control and maintenance were achieved with CSIs but not with IIs. Results are discussed in terms of the potential use of…

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate derived manding skills in 2 adults with severe developmental disabilities and language deficits by contriving transitive conditioned establishing operations. Specifically, we evaluated whether a history of reinforced conditional discrimination learning would ultimately result in a derived mand…

Acquisition of verbal behavior is a major goal of interventions for children with developmental disabilities. We evaluated the effectiveness of manipulation of an establishing operation for functional discriminated mands. Four individuals with developmental disabilities participated in a training procedure designed to teach two separate mands for…

This study examined the effects of modeling versus instructions on the choices of 3 typically developing children and 3 children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) whose academic responding showed insensitivity to reinforcement schedules. During baseline, students chose between successively presented pairs of mathematics problems…