Emergent Tact Control Following Stimulus Pairing: Comparison of Procedural Variations
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Emergent Tact Control Following Stimulus Pairing: Comparison of Procedural Variations Anna Ingeborg Petursdottir 1
& Stephanie
M. Neaves 1 & Orlexia N. Thomas 1
Published online: 20 November 2020 # Association for Behavior Analysis International 2020
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., Hughes & Barnes-Holmes, 2016) * Anna Ingeborg Petursdottir [email protected]
1
Department of Psychology, Texas Christian University, Box 298920, Fort Worth, TX 76129, USA
194
The Analysis of Verbal Behavior (2020) 36:193–214
operant in the speaker’s repertoire (see also Greer, Pohl, Du, & Moschella, 2017), sometimes referred to as bidirectional naming (Miguel, 2016). Tact control emerges in some cases as a by-product of a social reinforcement contingency that does not explicitly include the tact. First, tact control over a specific response form may emerge following the reinforcement of the same response form as a mand (e.g., Finn, Miguel, & Ahearn, 2012; Petursdottir, Carr, & Michael, 2005) or an intraverbal (Petursdottir & Haflidadottir, 2009), even when the putative discriminative stimulus for the tact is absent at the
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