Teaching Stimulus-Stimulus Relations to Minimally Verbal Individuals: Reflections on Technology and Future Directions

This paper discusses recent methodological approaches and investigations that are aimed at developing reliable behavioral technology for teaching stimulus-stimulus relations to individuals who are minimally verbal and show protracted difficulty in acquiring such relations. The paper has both empirical and theoretical content. The empirical component presents recent data concerning the possibility of generating rapid relational learning in individuals who do not initially show it. The theoretical component (1) considers decades of methodological investigations with this population and (2) suggests a testable hypothesis concerning some individuals exhibit unusual difficulties in learning. Given this background, we suggest a way forward to better understand and perhaps resolve these learning challenges.