Association for Behavior Analysis International

This symposium will include three recently completed projects by the 2019 Verbal Behavior Special Interest Group (VBSIG) research and student grant competition winners. The VBSIG aims to support the advancement of verbal behavior research and to disseminate theoretical, empirical, and practical information about verbal behavior. These papers exemplify that aim. The first paper by Frampton, Axe, Covall, and Padmanabhan will describe procedures for teaching problem solving skills to answer novel intraverbal questions utilizing a mobile application. The next two papers focus on the emergence of untrained skills. Zaltzman, Parry-Cruwys, MacDonald, and Sweeney-Kerwin examined the use of observational learning in a young child with autism who was taught to engage in echoic, tact, and intraverbal behaviors following exposure to a model. The final paper, presented by Aragon, Rodriguez, McKeown, and Luczynski, describes procedures to facilitate the emergence of verbal behavior in the form of Intraverbal-tacts. The studies present results that may inform verbal behavior researchers and practitioners alike.

graduate students, researchers, clinicians interested in verbal behavior

Learning by observing others has great benefits as it allows an individual to learn new skills without directly contacting the contingencies. Results from previous research on teaching skills necessary to emit OL responses are promising but an analysis of OL using Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior (1957) is lacking. The purpose of the present study was to address the limitations of previous research by conceptualizing OL using Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior (1957) in the context of a replication and extension of DeQuinzio and Taylor (2015). After teaching one child diagnosed with an ASD to emit a chain of vocal verbal responses including an echoic, the statement of a rule, and either the same response as the echoic or the correction statement "I don't know" she was observed to correctly tact previously unknown pictures after observing a model. Interobserver agreement was collected for 35% of OL and tacting responses and for 34% of vocal response chain (VRC) responses and was 79% and 100% respectively. Future research should continue to analyze OL using Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior (1957) as it might lead to a more parsimonious and conceptually systematic analysis.

Failing to teach children with autism to leverage multiple control when making conditional discriminations may contribute to erring when required to emit intraverbal-tacts (i.e., answering different questions about a picture). For example, when shown the picture of a red square and asked, “What shape?” a child may answer, “red.” This study evaluated if a curriculum sequence inspired by a conceptual analysis of multiple control (Michael, Palmer, & Sundberg, 2011) would facilitate the emergence of intraverbal-tacts in children with autism. More specifically, children learned to tact the various elements in pictures (e.g., the shapes triangle, square, and circle), tact the categories the elements belong to (e.g., square is a shape), and list members of a category (e.g., triangle, square, and circle in response to, “What are some shapes?”). In the case that intraverbal-tacts did not emerge following mastery of these skills, the children learned a selection response in which they would attend to a picture (e.g., a red square) and a vocal stimulus (e.g., “Show me shape.”) and then select the correct element from an array of the various elements (i.e., different colors and shapes). We discuss the efficacy of this curriculum sequence in facilitating the emergence of intraverbal-tacts.